We've just released a major update (Version 4.0) to our Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software Report, which evaluates nineteen Enterprise 2.0 vendors.

Our subscribers will see several new vendors under review as well as an overhauled set of evaluation criteria. More about those in the coming weeks.

For now I'd like to share one of the big themes of the report: customer disappointment with major platform vendors.

Why? It turns out that business units want....ready-made business applications, not the promise of a development platform. And while major platform vendors (IBM, Microsoft, Oracle) can check numerous functional boxes for collaboration and social networking, they don't provide many polished applications out-of-the-box.

Some commentators have suggested that the real answer here lies in broader ecosystems, and I believe there's some truth to that. But "ecosystem" for platform vendors today primarily means armies of systems integrators willing to write one-off extensions to the base code, at no small fee. This becomes yet another dimension to the disappointment customers are sharing with us.

I'm not suggesting that an all best-of-breed approach is nirvana. To quote my colleague Kashyap from our media release yesterday:

To be sure, a mixed vendor strategy presents near-term challenges for enterprise systems architectures, as well as long-term challenges for business users, who may later confront splintered profiles and disconnected activity streams.

The good news is that, in this maturing Enterprise 2.0 marketplace, you have a wide array of plausible choices.

Subscribers can find the latest updates here. To download a free sample, click here.