I'm just back from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, where the big takeaway was that collaborative tools are moving out of the hype phase into the implementation mode. This means a raft of products, to be followed by a titanic market battle among Cisco, IBM, Google, Jive, and others. One offering on display was SAP's StreamWork, which adds a business-intelligence twist to the whole workplace social tool thing. Click ahead for the video demo.Notably, StreamWork is a cloud-based offering. It's also open in the sense that SAP partners like Scribd and Box.net has added features -- document viewing and content management, respectively -- to the platform. It's also positioned as low-cost, starting at $9 per month per user.

Although no one's talking much about it now, cost is likely to be a big factor in both rate of corporate update and in which company wins the market battle. But I digress; I'll have more about that in an upcoming column.

Franz Aman, SAP's chief of new product concepts, demonstrated StreamWork in a keynote at Enterprise 2.0. Personally, I kind of like the fact that StreamWork doesn't go hog-wild with a heavy Facebook-like look-and-feel, which, paradoxically, is a defining characteristic of an E2.0 products. It presents more as a corporate tool, and I guess in my bland, workplace persona, that's something I'm comfortable with.

StreamWork also seems to have a tight tie-in with SAP's existing BI capabilities, though I guess you have to also be a user of that stuff to link it in. As our own Doug Henschen reported when StreamWork general availability hit at the end of March, "deeper integrations with SAP applications will be announced in the second half of 2010."

This raises a collateral question: It seems like SAP's natural customer base for StreamWork will organizations which already use its BI and other enterprise software products. Indeed, it's unclear whether SAP's go-to-market strategy will focus on competing with the new crop of E2.0 products like Cisco Quad and IBM's Lotus Live, or whether SAP will mostly evangelize to its existing customer base. I suspect that latter.

Here's the video, which is short demo shot at Enterprise 2.0 with SAP marketing manager Holly Simmons:

The SAP StreamWork page is here.

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Alex Wolfe is editor-in-chief of InformationWeek.com.