The SharePoint Phenom
Exploring the Services Platform of the Century

JB Holston: The enhancements to SharePoint 2010 were substantive. It’s more enterprise class. It’s easier to add applications to than 2007. ECM is better, but not best-of-breed. Search is better, although the jury’s still out on that. They bundled some BI capability in that 2007 didn’t have. Also, Microsoft sold it heavily as a social platform, and they swam into that market right when it was heating up. (A lot of people have picked up SharePoint because they were told it was a good platform for social.)

But it’s not any one of the things; it’s the combination of all this stuff. It’s a classic Swiss Army knife.

Dan Holme:  Executives will always respond to a cost argument, and there is almost always an argument for SharePoint being lower cost. As Paul pointed out, most organizations already have some sort of enterprise agreement with Microsoft, so it’s easy to add on. Plus SharePoint replaces legacy systems, it consolidates systems, it’s cheap to begin with... and add to that the fact that it unseats expensive legacy applications. Even after professional services, it’s much cheaper. Much cheaper.

Chris Geier: Plus executives love the dashboards you can create, showing the business operations. All the pretty pictures! Seriously, they respond to the ability to show business problems and gain insight into what those business problems are. But Dan is right about the cost argument: I had a project that saved users 10 minutes a week. That doesn’t sound like much, but spread across the employee base that translated into 1,000% ROI! I was told that I needed to tell the CIO that it was only a 32% ROI, because he was expecting a 10% ROI! He wouldn’t have believed me. A small savings in human productivity can have an insanely high ROI. Unfortunately it’s very rarely measured or accounted for.

Paul Doscher: SharePoint is core to Microsoft’s pricing strategy. Because all the new functionality has true linkages to MS Office, it adds incremental revenue to existing customer access licenses.

JB Holston: That’s right. They do need to add value to their suite in order to add to their licensing revenue. They can’t get there by merely enhancing Office. They’re not going to go to Citibank next year and say, “Hey, give us $150 million over the next few years because there’s all this cool stuff in Excel you didn’t know about before.” But instead if they can go to them with upgraded BI, FAST search, better social tools, then that $150 million is not an apocryphal story... that’s the CIO and CFO saying, “yep, we’re going to extend our relationship with Microsoft.”

Paul Doscher: There’s one other thing you have to admire about Microsoft: A lot of organizations, especially with younger employees coming on board, are trying to hook into the social, collaborative consciousness. That market is confused. A lot of companies are trying to commercialize that opportunity—“Twitter for the enterprise,” “Facebook for the enterprise.” Kudos to Microsoft to push that very hard while it’s a very hot topic. Their message is: “You get the social, and, oh, by the way, look at all this other stuff you get by staying with your large strategic vendor.” They’ve come out with technology that demystifies the social arena, while giving the CIOs a safe harbor. Better to stick with a vendor you know and already have a relationship with. It might not be the greatest solution right now, but they’ll get it right eventually.