Google Wave may have crashed on the beach of consumer indifference, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the real-time collaboration platforms will be lost at sea.
Novell Systems, battling Google, Microsoft and IBM over enterprise software contracts, said it will continue working to bring its Novell Pulse real-time collaboration platform to the market despite the demise of Wave.
Google said Aug. 4 it would stop building Wave, which rolls instant messaging, e-mail, live editing and social networking tools in one platform, as a standalone product. Wave technology lives on in open source and will be scattered to other Google Apps over time.
Novell Pulse is the company’s answer to Wave, providing social connections, rich profiles, real-time co-authoring, chat and file exchange.
Novell’s selling point for business customers is that having all of these tools on one palette lets users connect without switching between multiple applications.
The platform has been in beta with the company’s 7,000 employees, partners and customers since March.
Novell spokesman Ian Bruce said in a blog post that while Wave was aimed at the broader consumer segment Pulse delivers the right collaboration tools for businesses with the security controls enterprises require.
“Novell is highly committed to the future of enterprise collaboration, and Novell Pulse is on track,” for general release later this year Bruce wrote Aug. 4.
“Further, we remain committed to pursuing the benefits of real-time collaboration to enable new applications, users and organizations to work together.”
Pulse leverages the Wave Gadget API and Google’s Wave Federation Protocol, allowing Pulse users to communicate in real time with users on any other Wave provider.
Because those technologies have been released to open source, Novell shouldn’t experience a complication there.
In the meantime, Novell would do well to consider the reasons Wave didn’t make it, which eWEEK outlined here. There were more problems than Wave’s consumer focus.
Novell would also do well to pay attention to rivals such as SAP, whose StreamWork provides a similar real-time collaboration experience, as well as the cloud computing suites of Google, Microsoft and IBM.