Here comes the Wave

This week Google finally distributed a limited set of invites to its Wave collaboration application.

Irwin Lazar, Vice President & Service Director, Nemertes Research

October 1, 2009

1 Min Read
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This week Google finally distributed a limited set of invites to its Wave collaboration application. Wave represents a fundamental re-thinking of the way people collaborate and is designed to break the death-grip e-mail still has on communications.

Wave has come up a lot in recent conversations with vendors and end-users alike. Vendors are concerned that Google will emerge as a strong competitor in the unified communications and collaboration market, while enterprise IT architects are still reluctant to embrace Google as an alternative to IBM Lotus and Microsoft, but are enticed by Google's approach to integrating real-time and non-real-time collaboration.

I tend to think the real impact of Wave won't be as much a mass adoption by knowledge workers as it will drive new features and innovations to applications including Notes and Outlook. Just as Skype introduced the world to UC, perhaps Wave will do the same for a new paradigm for collaboration.

About the Author

Irwin Lazar

Vice President & Service Director, Nemertes Research

Irwin Lazar is the Vice President and Service Director at Nemertes Research, where he manages research operations, develops and manages research projects, conducts and analyzes primary research, and advises numerous enterprise and vendor clients. Irwin is responsible for benchmarking the adoption and use of emerging technologies in areas including VOIP, UC, video conferencing, social computing, collaboration, contact center and customer engagement.

A Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and sought-after speaker and author, Irwin is a blogger for No Jitter and frequent author for SearchUnifiedCommunications.com. He is a frequent resource for the business and trade press and is regular speaker at events such as Enterprise Connect and Interop. Irwin's earlier background was in IP network architecture, design and engineering.

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