Intel-backed Enterprise 2.0 suite is discontinued

beyond their original niches, SocialText and NewsGator have replicated not only the SuiteTwo components but also newer ones, like workplace social networking, activity notification feeds and Twitter-like microblogging status updates.

"It was difficult for example in the SuiteTwo architecture to get a notification that someone had posted a new blog post, or that someone had updated a wiki page, or to pass information back and forth between the various solutions. It was a lot of work," Kellner said.

There are no hard feelings between the SuiteTwo partners and SpikeSource, whose migration plans for SuiteTwo include steering customers toward the partners. Since SuiteTwo is a superset of partners' software products, migration should be straightforward, he said.

Forrester's Young agrees. "The underlying products in SuiteTwo and their vendors are still here and innovating. It shouldn't be hard for a SuiteTwo customer to go to these vendors and put the thing back together," Young said.

Young's advice is for SuiteTwo customers to identify which component is delivering the most value for them and approach that vendor first.

SpikeSource pulled the plug on SuiteTwo in part because it wasn't in its best interest to focus on any particular software market segment, such as enterprise 2.0 products, CRM (customer relationship management) or content management, but rather to stick to its strengths: to assist ISVs with services like code testing, software maintenance and development.

As such, SpikeSource is focusing on its new Solutions Factory, launched in April 2008 and described as an automated platform for assembling, testing, packaging, certifying and updating software from ISVs. Along with the Solutions Factory launch, SpikeSource also announced that it had closed a new round of funding led by Intel Capital. Intel also uses SpikeSource's Solutions Factory services in its Intel Software Partner Program, Sartorio said.

Ironically, Intel still seems interested in Enterprise 2.0, judging by a demo of a workplace social-networking system that its CEO, Paul Otellini, gave in November at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, two years after SuiteTwo's introduction.

The demoed system included Web-based enterprise collaboration tools for social networking, blogging, wikis, online meetings and syndicated feeds. A company like Intel, with 86,000 employees worldwide, would put such a system to good use to let staffers better collaborate, obtain training and education, and find the data they need to do their jobs, he said.

Such a social-networking system for the workplace, which would require strong security and control features for IT departments, doesn't exist, he said. "I don't see any company really addressing this," Otellini said.

Maybe Otellini never paid close attention to SuiteTwo, which could have very well become such a system. Intel declined to comment about SuiteTwo.

Actually, if he moves quickly, Otellini might still be able to place an order for SuiteTwo: At press time, SpikeSource hadn't yet updated the SuiteTwo Web site to indicate that the product is being discontinued, and its ordering page remained online as well.

Asked for further information about the enterprise social-networking system Otellini had demoed, an Intel spokesman said in an e-mail that it had been "a mock-up done for the sole purpose of his keynote, with no plans to productize."

At his company's Web 2.0 Summit show floor booth in November, an amused Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, remarked: "We've had a lot of people rushing to our booth as a result of the Intel presentation."