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While Marc Benioff may rail against the status quo in the enterprise software business, not all software buyers will join in the chorus, according to one of Benioff's chief competitors.

Web-based business software sold by companies such as Benioff's Salesforce.com will likely augment, not replace, large, complex enterprise systems, SAP Chief Executive Henning Kagermann told The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.

Kagermann said that while some of the main selling points for Salesforce and other Web-based services make sense--namely, better usability and productivity--corporate buyers are a notoriously conservative bunch.

Kagermann: Big software is here to stay.

(Credit: SAP)

A slicker user interface and easier access to corporate applications answer only some of the needs of big business. Security, a uniform data model and corporate-wide compliance with regulatory rules are more pressing for C-level executives, he argues.

Clearly, Henning's argument is biased toward his company's product line. But he may have a point: it's more difficult to manage Web-based systems implemented piecemeal at the departmental level. Regulatory compliance is becoming a corporate nightmare, and companies need all of the help they can get.

Still, much of the real innovation is taking place at companies like Salesforce and Google, as well as at many smaller firms hard at work defining the next wave of cloud-based business software. (Microsoft is making strides here, too).

SAP, for its part, is still struggling with its on-demand strategy.

As Rishi Chandra, product manager for Google Enterprise, said earlier this month, technology innovation is being spurred by the consumer market, which will, in turn, drive demand for better business systems.

Some things never change. For decades, CIOs have been a conservative lot. And for decades, end users have demanded more.

I didn't attend the Enterprise 2.0 Conference this year, but judging by Jeff Whatcott's commentary, I'm not sure I missed much.

It would appear that the Enterprise 2.0 world is still recycling the same froth in an attempt to stand out. Here's what Whatcott had to say:

I spent some time checking out the competition to benchmark our messaging and functionality. I was struck by how thoroughly undifferentiated the pitches were. Everyone was giving essentially the same demo, talking about the same functionality and use cases.

Internally, I heard from Jean Barmash on the Alfresco consulting team who echoed Jeff's comments:

Walking around the exhibition floor, it looked like everybody was offering very similar stuff--big focus on "communities"--creating them, managing them, etc.

It feels like we're in the early stages of Enterprise 2.0. Let's call it Enterprise 1.8 where everyone is showing the right slideware and demos, but few, if any, really know how to put it all to productive business use.

Until the money steps in, I think we're going to remain in a curious limbo where "shiny baubles" (a colleague's favorite term) get rolled out widely but for which few pay because no one on the enterprise side has really connected the dots between community, user-generated content, and enterprise productivity/business value.

Consumer Web 2.0 applications are influencing--and changing--how business systems are developed.

That was the message from Oracle on Wednesday at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco, where Oracle executives Thomas Kurian and Peter Moskowitz showed how to link disparate applications into a cohesive order entry system.

Call it "enterprise 2.0" if you'd like. But Salesforce.com and others will argue that this form of business mashup has been around for years.

Still, the Oracle demo is yet further proof that linking, tagging and other basic technologies borrowed from the consumer Web are making it vastly easier to construct fairly complex business applications.

Fueled by a round of venture capital, Jive Software is pushing into the corporate technology market with lightweight Web collaboration software.

The company is expected to announce next week that Sequoia Capital has invested $15 million into Jive Software which has been self-funded and profitable until now.

Jive, perhaps best known for its online forum software, is focusing the company on Clearspace, a product first written about here and commercially introduced earlier this year.

The software is meant to be a lightweight alternative to more structured document management applications like Microsoft's SharePoint. With Clearspace, end users can start wikis, write blogs and share documents without significant upfront training, according to the company.

That lightweight, end-user focused approach to collaboration is starting to get interest from large companies, said Dave Hersh, Jive Software's CEO.

"We're getting RFPs (request for proposals) from the CIOs of very large companies," Hersh said. "A lot of it comes down to organizations stuck with too much structure with SharePoint or with blogs and wikis running rampant inside companies that are rarely sanctioned by IT."

The company has about 100 customers for Clearspace and will use the venture capital to fund expanded sales and product development.

BEA Systems in July will ship a series of corporate search and collaboration products designed around Web technologies.

The three products--Aqualogic Pages, Aqualogic Pathways, Aqualogic Ensemble--will initially be aimed primarily at customers of BEA's portal products but the company expects them to have broader appeal. Each will be sold individually, said Ajay Gandhi, director of emerging products at BEA's Business Interaction Division.

The infrastructure software company showed off early versions of the products at its customer conference last year and originally divulged plans for the product line back in 2005.

The common theme of the three products is the application of Web-based technologies, such as RSS feeds and bookmarking, for business collaboration.

Aqualogic Pages is an enterprise wiki application that's designed to let business users combine different sources of structured information, such as RSS feeds, and share those Web pages with others.

Aqualogic Pages lets people drop widgets onto a Web pages that collect information from the Web and corporate data sources.

(Credit: BEA Systems)

Another product aimed at the end users, rather than a developer, is Aqualogic Pathways which is a tool for improving enterprise search using tags and bookmarking, said Gandhi. People can create automated feeds that combine corporate and Internet information.

Aqualogic Ensemble, which will be sold to Web application developers and IT professionals, is a platform for building mashups.

Each of them are designed so that people can get to back-end business databases and applications using light-weight technologies. They also tie into corporate security systems and directories so IT people can control access to data, Gandhi said.