Next up: RSS demand will grow substantially

Last year I wrote: “In 2007, interest in the RSS “publish and subscribe” architecture grew as firms sought to syndicate internal content such as RFP requests, blog postings, wiki changes, and CRM data. While this demand growth was enough to keep RSS vendors like KnowNow and NewsGator Technologies busy, Forrester expects 2008 to be a banner year for RSS and specifically enterprise RSS. Why the optimism? In 2007, many firms discovered the value of blogs and wikis for knowledge workers, and a healthy number of firms made initial investments. However, for these tools to truly fulfill their potential, an RSS deployment becomes a must-have, otherwise new content goes unnoticed and most blogs and wikis will fall out of daily view of their users. As an RSS technology strategist, you must pursue tight partnerships with as many blog and wiki vendors as possible. Each vendor adds value to your existing deployments by sending you qualified prospects. While 9% of enterprise firms expect to consider the use of RSS in 2008, we believe that number will be close to 20% by year-end.”

OK, this one hurt.

In my defense the logic of the argument still feel sound, however the facts blow all sorts of holes in my prediction. Of the three enterprise RSS vendors selling into this space at the start of 2008: KnowNow went out of business completely; NewsGator shifted focus and now leads with its Social Sites for SharePoint offering, while its Enterprise Server catches much less attention; and Attensa has been very quiet this year. In other words, all is not well in the enterprise RSS space. Even the RSS marketing space has not had a terribly productive year, though Pheedo recently told me they have been doing 1 billion RSS impressions a month this year, compared to 2.1 billion in all of 2007.

Last week I spoke with Brian Kellner, NewsGator Vice President of Products, and he said that in 2008 there was “a lot of RSS activity and need for customers, but many did not buy directly against that need.” In other words many businesses have yet to realize they have an RSS problem. They know they have a problem, but instead of investing in RSS many bought other products like wikis, blogs, and social networking tools. Its a nice story, and Charlie Davidson, CEO at Attensa, told me much the same thing. But frankly I’m concerned there is something more fundamental going wrong here. At the end of the day enterprise RSS is predicated on the notion that shoving all communications through email is too inefficient and must be augmented with other communications channels. Is it possible that people simply don’t feel that pain strongly enough to invest the time and effort to learn to use RSS?* And that every wiki feed will eventually dump right into email because that is what people really want? KnowNow tried to take a plumbing approach to RSS and failed, so my guess is if you are not providing an end-user tool you won’t survive.

So we may be stuck between a rock and hard place here — a set of end users who are not interested in a new inbox, and a set of technologists who have better ways to move bits around the enterprise. It looks like NewsGator may have struck on the best solution: sell an end-user tool people actually want and use your own RSS tool as the plumbing. So is it possible there is no long term viable market for enterprise RSS? My gut says this is not the case, but if things don’t pick up in 2009 I will have a hard time concluding otherwise. So, since I still (mostly) believe in the fundamental argument of last year’s prediction, do I go on the limb and AGAIN predict a big year for RSS? What do you think? Would you pull the trigger two years in a row?

Score: Oliver -2, Market – 1

Up next: Mashups will mature and eat into other major markets

*Sidebar: this is most of the reason I think Yammer and other microblogging for the enterprise tools are doomed. Another inbox just has not yet caught on, and I have a hard time seeing a case were microblogging is successful and RSS is not.

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