Intel-backed Enterprise 2.0 suite is discontinued

An Intel-backed suite of Enterprise 2.0 software announced with much fanfare a bit over two years ago is being put out to pasture.

SuiteTwo, announced in November 2006 at an O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 show, is no longer being sold, and its maintenance period for existing customers will close at the end of this year.

"We're going through the end-of-life process for SuiteTwo," said Dominic Sartorio, senior director of product management at SpikeSource, Intel's lead partner in the effort.

When it was announced, SuiteTwo was seen as concrete proof that CIOs, IT directors and business managers had begun seriously considering the use of Web 2.0 technology in their workplaces.

In a bundle integrated and maintained by SpikeSource, SuiteTwo included blog publishing software from Six Apart, RSS content syndication software from NewsGator, and SimpleFeed and wiki software from Socialtext.

Backing the project was Intel Capital, Intel's venture capital arm, while Intel's Software and Solutions Group would hawk it through its large OEM (original equipment manufacturer) and reseller channels. Tech Data was later brought in to help with fulfillment. SuiteTwo could be bought as packaged software, hosted software or pre-loaded into a hardware appliance.

SpikeSource has notified the about 80 companies that use SuiteTwo regarding the phaseout and will provide migration assistance to them, Sartorio said. "We're going to be there to help customers, advise them, to do what's right for their deployments and users," he said.

One customer that will seek migration assistance from SpikeSource is Clinical Trial Semantics Inc. CTSi uses SuiteTwo as a key part of its project to build a Web-based system to help cancer patients discuss with their doctors appropriate clinical trials they can consider participating in as part of their treatment.

"We probably over-invested in a platform that clearly didn't have the user base," said CTSi CEO Etienne Taylor.

So far, SpikeSource has been a very responsive vendor to CTSi during the year or so that the nonprofit has been using SuiteTwo.

"Their professional services department has helped us way above and beyond the economics of having us as a customer," Taylor said. "They've been wonderful."

However, one thing SpikeSource didn't do was alert CTSi about its plans to phase out SuiteTwo. "They forgot us. Nothing personal, I'm sure," Taylor said with a chuckle.

For now, SuiteTwo has served its purpose very well in the project's first stage of development, and CTSi, which is working with the American Cancer Society, can see viable migration options, Taylor said. "It's kind of OK. A lot will depend on what we do next with SpikeSource."

The concept behind SuiteTwo was right, said Forrester Research analyst Oliver Young. Companies are adopting blogs, wikis, enterprise RSS and other Web 2.0 technologies to improve collaboration and communication among their employees, partners and customers. "The market has moved in that direction pretty aggressively," he said.

"The problem with SuiteTwo wasn't the idea. The problem was the execution. They were trying to cobble together products from five or six independent companies, and it never looked like anything more than a bunch of applications that were duck-taped together," Young said.

Consequently, after its initial splash, SuiteTwo didn't get nearly as much attention from potential customers as its capabilities would have otherwise merited, and it became a sideshow for the partner vendors involved as well, Young said.

"SuiteTwo had a lot of great ideas [behind it] but there were shortcomings in the implementation and go-to-market strategies," said Brian Kellner, NewsGator's vice president of product management.

SimpleFeed's CEO Mark Carlson concurs. "All of our involvement pretty much stopped three or four months after the initial SuiteTwo announcement," he said.

While SuiteTwo failed to gain traction, vendor partners like NewsGator and Socialtext noticed that demand for a suite like that was real and expanded their own offerings beyond their niche areas to offer more comprehensive collaboration and communication functionality.

"We started seeing that the social side of our solutions had a lot of value to offer and we started going down that path," Kellner said.

For example, in expanding