Published 28 August 2020

Abstract

After decades of mixed results and occasional dead ends, the enterprise market landscape for communication, collaboration, and content (3C) products is shifting to a new and more productive focus on contextual activities. Coinciding with broader Digital Enterprise trends and accelerated by the abrupt transition to remote work triggered by the 2020 pandemic, the contextual activity shift also applies architectural and user experience models that have proven effective in consumer-oriented domains.

The shift has deeply disrupted the enterprise 3C vendor competitive landscape, resulting in us now calling this space 3CA, for communication, collaboration, content, and activities. Vendors have been moving in this direction with Microsoft, for example, rushing to introduce Microsoft Teams in late 2016 after Slack and its “where work happens” value proposition impacted the legacy email- and meeting-centric 3C norm. Google, after years of limited focus on enterprise opportunities, hired a new leadership team for Google Cloud and G Suite, and is now similarly seeking to capitalize on 3CA dynamics. Smaller 3CA vendors including Atlassian and Zoom have built strong market momentum and, along with Slack, seek to relegate the enterprise incumbents to supporting roles. Workplace by Facebook is another compelling 3CA candidate, for enterprises that can overcome trust concerns based on Facebook’s consumer market challenges.

The contextual activity shift is also being driven by a renewed focus on no- or low-code development tools such as IFTTT, Microsoft Power Automate, and Zapier. Combining these tools with applications and content resources in users’ preferred work environments can lead to seamless activity automation, improved productivity, and reductions in meetings and inbox processing.

This report explains the origins and implications of the 3CA shift, provides leading 3CA vendor profiles, and concludes with recommendations for enterprise planners seeking to leverage the new 3CA opportunities.

Executive Summary

The enterprise market landscape at the intersection of communication, collaboration, and content had frankly become a bit dull by 2015. After several vendor hype-driven waves promoted unrealistic expectations, including an “enterprise 2.0” vision that mostly failed to come to fruition, many enterprises had reverted to work routines dominated by email, basic file sharing, and traditional meetings. The inevitable next update to SharePoint Server was seen by many enterprise planners as something akin to a routine dental check-up, tedious and likely to be at least a bit painful, but also not optional.

The last five years have dramatically altered business as usual. With Slack and other disruptive vendors facilitating new work models, incumbent enterprise vendors have been compelled to make sweeping changes to their product portfolios, most notably with Microsoft scrambling to launch Microsoft Teams, its Slack competitor, and subsequently making the combination of Teams and Outlook the foundation of its enterprise communication/collaboration strategy.

Taking the long view, however, the recent disruption can be seen as part of a multi-decade shift away from PC-centric and proprietary platforms to an open and internet architecture-based framework, one that has been central to an evolving vision in research and education domains for more than a half-century. Slack capitalized on the shift, starting by essentially reimplementing Internet Relay Chat for today’s mobile-, cloud-, and social-first enterprise world, and went on to popularize a work model centered on contextual activities instead of the earlier default routine supported by email, file-sharing, and often unproductive meetings.

This report explains the shift to contextual activities and its pivotal role in broader Digital Enterprise programs. Starting with some technology hype wave-independent core definitions, the report highlights the evolution of two parallel paths: the open and ultimately internet-centric research and education domain and the traditionally more PC-centric and proprietary product domain. The open and internet-centric model has prevailed, making it possible for enterprises to focus more on supporting work – using contextual activities – with far fewer distractions based on the underlying technologies and switching among collections of specialized apps.

The report concludes with recommendations for enterprise planners seeking to leverage the new opportunities to streamline work through contextual activities. Both successfully embracing the new opportunities and overcoming transitional challenges (including consolidation and migration) will be key to enterprise employee productivity and job satisfaction. In other words, it’s a competitive imperative, but thankfully it doesn’t need to be as tedious or painful as earlier transitions, and end users, especially those adjusting to new remote-work routines triggered by the 2020 pandemic, are likely to appreciate rather than resist the new ways of working, in part because most of them are already using similar approaches in their non-work routines.

3CA Fundamentals

The enterprise IT industry has, during the last few decades, taken many liberties with terms including communication, collaboration, content, coordination, community, and conferencing. Other related terms have gone in and out of favor several times over the years, including workflow, knowledge management, and no- or low-code app development. To avoid potential misunderstanding due to the often vendor hype-driven historical vocabulary patterns, here are some basic definitions:

• Communication: the transmission of information from one point to another, typically using communication channels
• Collaboration: joint and purposeful activity, usually transpiring in a (physical or virtual) workspace
• Content: digitized information, which is likely to either be document-centric (e.g., word processing documents, web pages, and XML or JSON documents) or database-centric (e.g., relational or graph databases)
• Activity: something a person wants to accomplish in order to get things done

It is helpful to distinguish between activities and apps because activities are focused on things people want to accomplish, while apps have traditionally been more technology-first. The goal is to keep the technology invisible, so that people can focus on their work activities in their preferred contexts rather than learning and juggling several specialized (and often redundant) apps.

Using the 3CA abbreviation is a lot less tedious than typing or reading “communication, collaboration, content, and activities” dozens of times, but note that 3CA is not an established industry category term in this domain. That said, we think it makes perfect sense and that it very well may catch on. It’s used as a shortcut in this report, to distinguish our analysis from the many earlier permutations of “3C” (such as communication, collaboration, and content; communication, conferencing, and coordination; communication, community, and commerce), and to emphasize the shift in focus from the enabling 3C technologies to the contextual activities they can productively streamline.

The example in Figure 1 includes a Microsoft Lists-managed event itinerary viewed within a Microsoft Teams sales workspace. Instead of toggling among several applications to view and interact with resources related to sales projects, sales team members have a single place to share and collaborate on shared activities.

Figure 1: Microsoft Lists in Microsoft Teams (source: Microsoft)

Microsoft Teams has an integration architecture that makes it possible for non-developers to easily embed a wide variety of app types. In addition to Microsoft’s latest apps such as Lists and Tasks, for example, a Teams workspace could also contain a live view of a project plan managed in Asana or Trello.

The contextual activity scenario in Figure 2 is a Quip document with an embedded Salesforce sales report and a sales team conversation for the document context. The sales report data is live, not a static snapshot, and spreadsheet-like formula expressions are used in the document body to summarize data ranges in the embedded report. With this type of dynamic and conversational document, sales team members can stay focused on their task at hand and not be distracted by jumping between a sales report, one or more chat tools, and email messages with file attachments containing static data snapshots (that are likely to be outdated as soon as they’re copied and sent).

Figure 2: A Quip Sales Pipeline Report (source: Salesforce)

How We Got Here: A Brief 3CA History

This section briefly summarizes key industry developments that led to current enterprise 3CA market dynamics. Two long-term paths, now converging, are reviewed: the research and education domain, which has historically been open, community-driven, and internet-centric (indeed, it created the internet) and the traditionally more vendor-driven and proprietary domain of enterprise IT products.

Circa 1975: Xerox It for Me

Enterprise 3CA patterns circa 1975 were primarily analog and physical, often supported by large numbers of administrative assistants. Communication was likely to be in-person or via telephone discussions, collaboration was mostly done in offices and meeting rooms, and content was likely to printed on paper. A state-of-the-art mainstream enterprise 3CA device circa 1975 was likely to look something like this:

Figure 3: Xerox 4500 Photocopier (source)

Small groups of people working in research and education domains circa 1975, however, had very different 3CA experiences. The computing pioneers at Xerox PARC, for example, many of them inspired by Doug Engelbart’s 1968 “Mother of all Demos”, had created the Xerox Alto, working on networked workstations that would go on to directly influence Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and many others. From a 3CA perspective, the Alto, building on Doug Engelbart’s vision for augmenting human intellect, had multi-channel communication capabilities and interactive hypertext document-based content and collaboration.

The PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) pioneers at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign’s Computer-based Education Research Laboratory (CERL) had an even earlier start. CERL students and faculty had, by the mid-1970s, been working with 3CA capabilities that wouldn’t go mainstream for many years to come. An excerpt from the Illinois Distributed Museum’s overview:

Figure 4: PLATO Feature Timeline

To recap: if you were working in a mainstream enterprise circa 1975, your 3CA world was likely to be mostly analog and physical. If you were lucky enough to be a student or professor at the University of Illinois CERL or working at Xerox PARC, you experienced a pattern William Gibson would later observe: “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed” (source).

Circa 1990: Put It in Notes

Fast-forwarding fifteen years to circa 1990, mainstream enterprise 3CA patterns were dominated by PCs and local area networks, with client/server applications building momentum. Microsoft Office and other productivity applications were widely used for content creation, generally with familiar print-oriented models rather than the more dynamic, hypertext-based content model used by Xerox PARC and other research groups. The print-centric model unfortunately limited the extent to which users could take advantage of new opportunities resulting from the switch to digital content, but it reflected the reality that most content was still being communicated via paper (typically distributed by inter-office mailing printed documents), while most collaboration was still done in offices or meeting rooms.

The 3CA influence from research and education domains was starting to appear in mainstream enterprises, most influentially with Lotus Notes (released in late 1989). Quoting from The History of Notes and Domino:

“PLATO Group Notes became popular and remained so into the 1980s. However, after the introduction of the IBM PC and MS-DOS by Microsoft in 1982, the mainframe-based architecture of PLATO became less cost-effective. Group Notes began to metamorphose into many other “notes type” software products.

Ray Ozzie, Tim Halvorsen, and Len Kawell worked on the PLATO system at CERL in the late 1970s. All were impressed with its real-time communication. Halvorsen and Kawell later took what they learned at CERL and created a PLATO Notes-like product at Digital Equipment Corporation.

At the same time, Ray Ozzie worked independently on a proposal for developing a PC-based Notes product. At first, he was unable to obtain funding for his idea. However, Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corporation, saw potential in Ozzie’s work and decided to invest Lotus’s money for its development. Kapor’s business acumen, creativity, and foresight were critical in changing Ozzie’s vision into reality.”

Notes defined a new “groupware” product category, with an integrated architecture spanning several 3CA domains, as suggested by this image from Groupware: Communication, Collaboration, and Coordination (Lotus Development Corp., 1995):

Figure 5: The Lotus Notes Groupware 3CA Architecture

From a 3CA perspective:

• Communication: Notes had pervasively integrated enterprise messaging; it was the first commercially successful PC client/server email product
• Collaboration: Notes applications served as structured workspaces for a wide range of purposes
• Content: Notes documents were hypertext, compound documents, edited using forms (document templates) and organized into customizable views
• Activities: Notes also served as a an application platform, with a development framework that made it easy to start by customizing application templates for common business activity domains; Notes documents contained application elements such as action buttons and the ability to hide or display document elements based on the document state or a user’s permissions

On a personal note, I’m not completely unbiased in this context, as I led the Notes product management team at Lotus during the mid-1990s, but I believe the seamless integration of 3CA capabilities in Lotus Notes has yet to be surpassed. That didn’t prevent Notes from being competitively eclipsed, however, as some of the aspects of the product that made it possible to run Notes on the relatively primitive PC and server operating systems of c1990 became liabilities when platform infrastructure services evolved.

Notes was still a nascent and relatively expensive product c1990, in any case, so it was more likely you would send a printout or floppy disk, if you were a mainstream enterprise employee.

During the same period, 3CA advances in research and education domains continued to rapidly evolve, using a more open and community-based approach, compared to the then generally proprietary and closed world of enterprise IT products.

The research community that included Xerox PARC had by this time created a range of internet-based and open standards-based 3CA apps/services, including Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Network News, email, search, and more. When Ed Krol’s Whole Internet User’s Guide and Catalog was published in 1992, there were internet counterparts for most the PLATO features listed in Figure 4, liberated from PLATO’s early mainframe-centric hardware and networking technologies.

The initial versions of the primary formats and protocols created by (now Sir) Tim Berners-Lee for the World Wide Web, HTML, URI, and HTTP, were finished by late 1990 (see the W3C’s History of the Web for more details), and the first web page was published by the end of 1990, although the web wouldn’t go mainstream until the Mosaic browser, another creation of people working at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, was released in 1993; it was then quickly supplanted by Netscape Navigator, created by a group of former University of Illinois students including Marc Andreessen.

Metaphor Computer Systems was another research domain cross-over that included an integrated suite of features that later became very influential in mainstream enterprise 3CA domains. The Metaphor Data Interpretation System, released in 1984, was a Xerox PARC spin-off, building an advanced 3CA suite on a customized version of the Xerox Star (the successor to the Alto).

Figure 6: A Metaphor Computer Systems Workstation (source)

Among other advances, Metaphor included a capsule-based activity model that made it possible for non-developers to create and share elaborate workflows. A marketing manager, for example, could use Metaphor’s graphical environment to:

• Query sales trends from a relational database (initially on Metaphor-supplied Britton Lee database machines)
• Pipe the query results into a spreadsheet for further calculations and to create charts
• Embed the charts in a hypertext document highlighting sales trends
• Send the hypertext document to others on the product team via a dedicated Metaphor network

Unfortunately, Metaphor was acquired in 1991 by IBM, one of its largest customers at the time, and IBM management prioritized an OS/2 port of the Metaphor system; Metaphor faded away and ceased operations in 1994. Metaphor had by then directly inspired product development teams at both Lotus and Microsoft, however, and its influence can still be seen in many of today’s no-/low-code and spreadsheet-centric activity development tools.

General Magic was noteworthy pioneer from this period that warrants reconsideration. As a project spun out of Apple in 1990 led by innovators who would go on to guide an amazing number of influential products and services, General Magic was, for 3CA capabilities on networked mobile devices, astonishingly far ahead of its time – too far ahead, however, and ultimately liquidated in 2004. The General Magic documentary is a great resource to explore, if you’d like to know more about the people who brought the General Magic vision to fruition and later went on to leadership roles in Apple and other companies.

To recap: if you were a mainstream enterprise employee circa 1990, your primary 3CA modus operandi were likely still facilitated by telephones, printed documents, and meeting rooms. If you were an educator or researcher, or lucky enough to be a brand manager at an enterprise using Metaphor’s system, your 3CA world was likely a mix of internet and hypertext apps/services that looked a lot like what mainstream enterprise employees, thirty years later, now experience using communications apps such as Microsoft Teams and Slack along with no-/low-code tools such as IFTTT, Microsoft Power Automate, and Zapier.

Circa 2005: Put It in SharePoint

Fast-forwarding another fifteen years to c2005, the open, internet community-driven, and standards-based approach was increasingly at the center of the mainstream enterprise 3CA world, but the results were not ideal when that world collided with the more traditionally proprietary, closed, and PC-centric enterprise installed base. Despite attempts to extend and integrate the more open 3CA apps and services into mainstream enterprise product offerings, with terms such as “enterprise 2.0” used to describe the inclusion of blogs, wikis, and other internet-centric 3CA innovations, a typical mainstream enterprise employee c2005 was likely to default to:

• A desktop telephone (and voicemail), a not-yet-smart mobile phone, and email, for most communication needs
• Offices and meeting rooms, and perhaps occasionally web conferencing systems such as Live Meeting (based on Microsoft’s 2003 acquisition of Xerox PARC spin-off PlaceWare), for collaboration, along with Microsoft SharePoint Server essentially serving a hybrid intranet platform with a file-sharing capabilities featuring an HTML user interface
• Updated versions of productivity applications – which by 2005 essentially meant Microsoft Office, commanding more than 90% market share – which were still more print-centric than hypertext-based, and with which sharing generally meant sending email messages with file attachments
• Activities often managed by digital versions of paper-centric forms, often initiated via SharePoint sites or Notes applications

Many enterprise employees had, by c2005, opted to rely on a combination of consumer-oriented 3CA apps/services and relatively low-cost cloud-based services they could acquire on their own, rather than depending on their IT counterparts to eventually meet their 3CA needs with the next release of SharePoint or Notes/Domino. Within a few years, apps/services such as Box, Dropbox, and Jive, often lacking official enterprise IT approval, were widely popular.

The overall mainstream 3CA landscape had by c2005 largely consolidated around a collection of apps and services for common 3CA needs. Building on a framework I started at Lotus, refined at Burton Group, and have since further revised, the 3CA big picture, at this point, could be described using this quadrant model:

Figure 7: Common 3CA Channels, Workspaces, and Services

The then-leading incumbent enterprise 3CA vendors – Microsoft, Google, and IBM – all had product suites that covered the 3CA quadrants, but with varying degrees of consistency and integration. Other companies, including Cisco and Oracle, also tried to break into the full spectrum 3CA race, but mostly ended up acquiring and squandering smaller 3CA vendors.

Microsoft was especially acquisitive in its 3CA initiatives c2005 beyond, and attempted to make SharePoint more compelling with several related acquisitions including:

• PlaceWare (2003), ported and launched as Live Meeting
• Groove Networks (2005), revised and rebranded as SharePoint Workspace
• Skype (2011), with the Skype for Business brand used to replace Office Communicator and Microsoft Lync Server
• Yammer (2012), to successfully “embrace and extend” some of the “enterprise 2.0” market opportunities Jive had popularized

Microsoft’s 3CA goals during this period included professional services programs and tools focused on migrating Notes/Domino/Sametime enterprise customers and programs designed to thwart Google’s then-fledgling 3CA offerings.

Tangentially, Microsoft was also a leading enterprise smartphone platform vendor at this point, with Windows Mobile (e.g., on the Treo 700w), competing primarily with RIM Blackberry and Nokia mobile device platforms. Indeed, Google’s 2005 acquisition of Android was reportedly in large part a strategy to prevent Microsoft from further expanding its enterprise monopoly to the smartphone realm, on the assumption that Microsoft would inevitably leverage such a monopoly to hinder or exclude Google services; Android’s value in competing with the iPhone wouldn’t be a consideration until 2007.

Google attempted to make its 3CA sufficiently similar to traditional enterprise apps/services to make them familiar to Microsoft Office users, but built on an internet-centric architecture and a competitively priced software-as-a-service mode. Google also introduced some innovative (but often short-lived) apps/services such as Google Wave, attempting to combine a mix of communication channel and collaborative workspace capabilities in a single app/service, but enterprises were mostly attracted to Google’s lower-cost and web-centric email and document creation, collaboration (co-authoring), and sharing capabilities.

Overall, Google was a highly successful 3CA vendor during this period, combining versions of Gmail, Google Docs, and other apps/services into an integrated suite that was, both architecturally and in terms of user experience, more like research/education domain internet-centric apps/services than traditional, PC-centric enterprise 3CA offerings. Google also made low-cost options available to educational institutions and school systems, leading to a generation of students who were more likely to join the enterprise workforce with skills in Google’s suite instead of Microsoft Office, and for whom collaborative document authoring and comment-based, intra-document conversations were likely to be skills acquired in middle school.

As a final c2005 note, and one that serves in some respects as a leading indicator for later activity-focused apps, a wave of “mash-up” tools was also heavily promoted by enterprise 3CA vendors during this period. Most of them quickly failed, however, primarily because they predated mainstream enterprise cloud platforms and relied on then still relatively immature browser apps.

To recap: if you were a c2005 mainstream enterprise employee and wanted to share content to facilitate a collaborative endeavor, you were most likely to share the content as an email message file attachment or via some other file-sharing app/service that your IT counterparts might have frowned upon. The “enterprise 2.0” future promoted by 3CA vendors might have looked bright ahead, with blogs, wikis, and other internet-centric apps/services poised for enterprise adoption, but you probably spent an inordinate amount of time triaging email and attending meetings.

Circa 2020: The Shift to Contextual Activities

Enterprise 3CA market dynamics during the last fifteen years were dominated by vendors leveraging new market opportunities that resulted from the dramatic shift to mobile devices, a faster-than-anticipated shift to enterprise cloud deployments, the explosive popularity of consumer social media, and incumbent 3CA vendors at times disruptively seeking to adapt to the dynamics (routinely disrupting their customer and partner communities as much as their competitors).

Consumer 3CA developments were also influential, with the “enterprise 2.0” expectation of blogs and wikis going mainstream in enterprises being largely derailed by 3CA patterns established by Facebook and Twitter. Several hopeful start-ups pitched their apps/services as “Facebook for the enterprise” only to see Facebook itself seek to fulfill that role with the introduction of Workplace by Facebook.

The rest of this section highlights some of the most significant 3CA developments of the last fifteen years in more detail; the next section includes projections of what’s likely to influence the next chapter in the enterprise 3CA story. Note that many of our examples lead with Microsoft because of its strong position in the industry over the past 20+ years. A topic we’ll consider later in this report is how this dominance is now being challenged and likely consequences that may impact our clients.

This diagram, presented at the 2016 Microsoft Ignite conference, is useful for context-setting:

Figure 8: From Microsoft Ignite 2016 session BRK3001: “The Ultimate Field Guide to Office 365 Groups”

As suggested in the diagram:

• By 2010, the enterprise IT view often assumed an orderly transition from one release of SharePoint Server to another, with SharePoint by that time dominating the enterprise 3CA landscape (along with Office and Exchange Server)
• From an enterprise user perspective, however, the mainstream 3CA picture changed dramatically during this period; SharePoint, Office, and Exchange were still likely to be the enterprises standards, but a new generation of cloud-based 3CA apps and services was increasingly deployed to address needs that SharePoint wasn’t, for mainstream enterprise users, successfully addressing

Reviewing some of the market developments that led to the expanding IT/end user divergence during this period, momentous shifts in device types are a good place to start. In 2005, most enterprise employees handled most of their 3CA and overall work needs using PCs, generally Windows laptops. Fifteen years later, smartphones and tablets have relegated PCs to much smaller roles, and Macs are much more widely used in enterprise environments (still less often than Windows PCs, overall, but usually at a scale that enterprise IT can’t disregard).

The 2007 introduction of the iPhone was the most impactful disruption. The iPhone was a smartphone market game-changer, and it, along with the first wave of Android-based iPhone clones that followed approximately a year later, quickly decimated enterprise smartphone incumbents. This transition also marked the beginning of the end of Windows Mobile (and its successor Windows Phone). The 2010 introduction of the iPad was another major 3CA milestone in both consumer and enterprise domains.

The 2006 introduction of Amazon Web Services was another profoundly important 3CA milestone. While Amazon was not able to broadly leverage the enterprise cloud shift for its own 3CA apps and services, specialized start-ups were able to rapidly create, deploy, and refine 3CA offerings by building on AWS. Enterprise employees could leverage Dropbox for file sharing and synchronization across their devices, for example, and streamlined project management solutions such as Asana and Trello were able to quickly build market momentum.

Revisiting the internet-centric versus traditional-enterprise-IT dichotomy from previous sections, modern device platforms such as Android and iOS and cloud platforms such as AWS collectively represented a major enterprise shift to the internet-centric approach. 3CA-focused start-ups thrived with clients based on HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, and hypertext content, while proprietary alternatives such as Microsoft .NET lost momentum.

Google, in contrast, was well positioned to capitalize on the device and cloud platform disruptions, since it had always been an internet-centric vendor and had its own global network of super-sized data centers. In its consumer-oriented apps/services, Google also productively leveraged its Knowledge Graph to apply related and structured resources in search and other contexts. As an everyday example, consider the search result below, which is one click away from a “pizza near me” Google search (that is, I clicked on Depot House of Pizza in the initial search result):

Figure 9: A Google Search Result Knowledge Panel

This is only a partial snapshot of the Google knowledge panel for a local pizzeria; I could also scroll down to explore related photos, Google reviews, and related searches. Even the partial search result snapshot in Figure 9, however, includes some subtly significant and knowledge graph-powered results such as links to the restaurant’s menu, its hours of business, a map (with directions from my current location a click away), and crowd-sourced estimates, by day of the week and time of day, of how busy it’s likely to be.

This and other Google knowledge panels for people, places, organizations, and other types of things leverage the Google Knowledge Graph, which, as of May 2020, contained 500 billion facts about 5 billion entities (according to Wikipedia). From an enterprise perspective, imagine using this type of contextual activity to search for “sales prospects near me” instead of “pizza near me”; the Google Knowledge Graph and its other content services clearly have significant enterprise 3CA potential.

Turning next to the social scene, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media apps/services impacted the consumer 3CA domain first, and people using modern devices quickly adopted related actions we now take for granted, including the ability to:

• Comment in context, along with the ability to have nested conversations in replies to comments
• Like or otherwise “emote” to provide feedback
• Share resources, both within the social networks and, thanks to sharing services available throughout Android and iOS, using email, messaging, other channels
• @mention people or resources
• Use tags to categorize resources
• Follow or otherwise subscribe to resources of interest
• Consolidate and manage notifications in activity streams, again optionally in conjunction with device platform services (e.g., iOS app-level notification setting options)

Slack, launched in 2013, leveraged the market dynamics described in this section to create a hugely disruptive app/service. Starting with what was essentially a modernized and mobile app-first reimplementation of Internet Relay Chat for Android and iOS, and leveraging AWS to scale worldwide, Slack revitalized communication channels for enterprises and many other domains (e.g., climate and political activist groups) as well.

Slack also productively adapted the IRC bot model (essentially the ability to have conversations with apps/services as well as other people). In addition, Slack built on a modern, internet-centric microservices API framework to facilitate easy integration with other apps/services, making it possible, for example, for Slack users to easily and contextually (i.e., in the context of a related conversation) share files stored in Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive.

Another significant 3CA development based on the same internet-centric microservices model during the last fifteen years was the creation of a new category for automation tools. IFTTT (for If This Then That; its pronunciation rhymes with “gift”), launched in 2011, was a pioneer in the domain with a simple model based on recipes (later renamed applets), actions, and events, and supported with a huge catalog of integration options. Someone with no programming experience, for example, could use IFTTT to automatically update a Google Sheet every time their preferred exercise app captured a run or bike ride.

IFTTT also became popular in the home automation and Internet of Things domains, making it possible, for example, to use an IFTTT applet on your smartphone, to, at the end of your workday, reset your smart thermostat, turn on your smart lights, play your favorite dinner music on your smart speaker, and preheat your smart oven.

IFTTT initially represented a small subset of what General Magic’s architects had in mind twenty years earlier, but it nonetheless proved to be a timely, useful, and popular tool, and several enterprise-oriented competitors followed, including Zapier and Microsoft Flow (later renamed Microsoft Power Automate). In the consumer market, Apple Shortcuts is another significant IFTTT competitor.

Other noteworthy start-ups that took advantage of the same market dynamics to create compelling new apps/services in productivity app domains most people had assumed were mature included:

• Quip, which had the audacity to start over with productivity apps (word processor and spreadsheet) for the mobile/cloud/social new realities; cofounded by people who had previously led pioneering projects at Facebook and Google, and launched in 2013, Quip was acquired by Salesforce in 2016
• Airtable, launched in 2014, built on mobile/cloud/social market dynamics to create a market-leading database app platform; in many ways representing what Microsoft Access and other earlier desktop database tools might have become, if they had successfully evolved for changing market dynamics, Airtable has successfully blurred the traditional boundaries between productivity apps/services and database tools
• Notion (2016) and Coda (2017), which provide two additional and intriguing examples of recent collaborative hypertext innovations at the intersection of productivity apps, databases, and cloud platforms

Several people leading the disruptive vendors, including Facebook Chief Product Officer Chris Cox and Notion’s founders, have expressed their appreciation for Doug Engelbart and his inspirational 1968 demo and later work. Their apps/services in many ways represent modernized implementations of breakthrough inventions created by Engelbart and his team, avoiding many of the constraints and otherwise counterproductive conventions that accumulated in the traditional PC-centric world during the last several decades.

Many of the enterprise 3CA incumbents did not effectively respond to these market dynamics, and some were left behind. Novell, once a leading enterprise messaging vendor with its GroupWise product family, saw its 3CA business decimated, and IBM, which attempted to complement its Notes/Domino and Sametime 3CA products with more the more internet-centric IBM Connections, was unable to prevent Microsoft from becoming the de facto enterprise 3CA standard with its combination of Office, Exchange, and SharePoint. Most of IBM’s 3CA product family, including Notes/Domino, Sametime, and Connections, was sold to HCL in 2019.

Microsoft and its 3CA customers went through several difficult and disruptive 3CA product family changes during the last fifteen years, including a protracted development cycle for the suite of apps/services today known as Microsoft 365. The introduction of Microsoft Teams in late 2016 was the most disruptive shift.

Microsoft had positioned SharePoint as the center of its collaboration and content product strategy through the September 2016 Microsoft Ignite conference, at which even trusted Microsoft partners such as the ones who created the semi-facetious diagram in Figure 8 openly acknowledged that things were not entirely working out according to Microsoft’s plan. SharePoint had achieved a dominating enterprise position, but many end users were confounded by and disliked the platform, not unlike the situation with Lotus Notes twenty years earlier.

A mere five weeks after the 2016 Ignite conference, Microsoft surprised most people in the SharePoint customer and partner communities by introducing Teams and tacitly disrupting almost everything but the traditional enterprise messaging (i.e., Outlook/Exchange) part of its 3CA offering set. A New York Times article titled Microsoft Puts Slack in Cross Hairs with New Office Chat App (11/2/2016) provided some details about how Teams was created, including the fact that “Bill Gates, a Microsoft co-founder and [then] technology adviser, even had a hand in its creation.”

We’ll dig into the Teams architectural details in a separate TechVision report, but for the purposes of this big-picture 3CA review, it’s important to note that Teams is much more than an attempt to “embrace and extend” Slack’s mobile/social IRC reincarnation. With Teams, Microsoft has also been able to push SharePoint into more of a background supporting role, making it possible for Microsoft 365 users to essentially spend their entire workdays in a mix of Outlook for traditional enterprise messaging (email and calendaring/scheduling), Teams for other communication channels, collaborative workspaces, and contextual activities, and a browser app for everything else, with more of the traditionally browser-based apps/services finding their way into Teams over time.

For example, Teams is now also positioned as the primary starting point for Microsoft 365 users working with Microsoft’s alternatives to Trello (Microsoft Tasks, originally called Planner) and Airtable (Microsoft Lists), along with the IRC-inspired capabilities in Slack (along with conversational bots). Microsoft has also successfully leveraged the same integration architecture used in Slack to produce an impressive community of partner apps/services that can be easily integrated into Teams to deliver contextual activities. Teams provided a useful vehicle for Microsoft to essentially relaunch a lot of the “conversations as a platform” capabilities the company introduced at its March 2016 Build conference in conjunction with Skype for Business (which Teams subsequently replaced) and Cortana.

Teams is also a major enterprise entry point for Azure infrastructure services, as every Teams team workspace creates an Azure Active Directory entry and relies on Azure services for identity, authorization, authentication, and more. Microsoft clearly plans to leverage many other Azure infrastructure services for Teams as well, over time. Microsoft does not, however, intend to provide an on-premises version of Teams.

Another strategic and surprising Microsoft shift during this period was its major commitment to open source and related modus operandi, accelerated after Satya Nadella replaced Steve Ballmer as CEO in 2014. Microsoft had made earlier commitments to a more open approach, with its earlier shift to Open XML for Office document formats being a major milestone (during a period when Steve Ballmer referred to open source as a “cancer”), but Nadella took Microsoft much further into the open world, including a deep commitment to open technologies on Azure, the 2018 acquisition of GitHub, and building on open source frameworks in products such as Power BI. Microsoft has also been much more aggressively multi-platform under Nadella’s leadership, although the most feature-rich versions of the Office native apps are still available only on Windows.

A final important circa 2020 3CA milestone to consider, before turning to some market projections, is the 2020 pandemic. When enterprise employees abruptly shifted to work-from-home mode in March 2020, conferencing-oriented communication tools and virtual workspaces of all types suddenly became mission-critical. There was at that point a significant surplus of no- or low-cost communications tools, including (consumer and/or enterprise) apps/services from Apple, Cisco, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Slack, and many other vendors, but Zoom Video Communications was the biggest beneficiary.

By the summer of 2020, Zoom found itself in a classic right product, right place, and right time scenario, making it possible for enterprises, schools, and other types of organizations to easily communicate and collaborate remotely. It wasn’t all smooth sailing, as Zoom had some humbling security and architecture lessons along the way, but by moving quickly to address its early deficiencies, Zoom was able to sustain its explosive growth, and by late August 2020, the company had a market capitalization of more than $80B.

Microsoft also gained from the abrupt remote work and school shift, with Teams deployments growing rapidly. Since Microsoft didn’t then have a consumer-oriented version of Teams, however, and since Google had churned through nearly a dozen messaging/meeting apps/services by 2020, leaving even G Suite advocates uncertain about which of Google’s many communications apps to use, Zoom was suddenly worth approximately three times more than the combined valuations of Box, Dropbox, and Slack.

To recap: if you were a c2020 mainstream enterprise employee, you were probably a bit bewildered by the fact that consumer-oriented 3CA apps/services were in many ways more productive than those provided by your employer (albeit also with far less security and privacy, and with the unfortunate potential to be weaponized for disinformation campaigns). You probably still spent an inordinate amount of time working through your email inbox and trying to keep up with a rapidly expanding collection of chat channels, between Zoom- and Teams-hosted meetings, perhaps remaining cautiously optimistic that the types of 3CA experiences you routinely used outside of work would become the norm in your enterprise work as well, in the not-too-distant future.

What’s Next: Near-Term 3CA Projections

The legendary computer industry pioneer and inventor Doug Engelbart, if he had been alive in 2020 (he died, at 88, in 2013), might have, when reviewing the enterprise 3CA state of the art, asked questions such as “What took you so long?” and “How could you let digital advertising-driven corporations become the de-facto standard providers of essential internet infrastructure services?!” We may revisit that second question in a separate TechVision report, but, at least when considering the often circuitous routes the IT industry followed to get to the c2020 3CA state of the art, Engelbart likely would have at least been relieved to know the internet-centric, open architecture, and overall modus operandi of the research and education communities had at long last prevailed in enterprise computing, and that most enterprise workers were finally benefitting from the types of networked and collaborative hypertext journaling systems he and Ted Nelson pioneered more than a half-century earlier.

In terms of the overall enterprise 3CA user experience, this report has hopefully convinced you that the 3CA future is likely to be focused on contextual activities. Large enterprises should be planning for 3CA products/services and initiate the building of strategies and architectures to support the integration of contextual activities into core workforce productivity offerings. Apps/services focused on subsets of the overall 3CA landscape will also continue, especially – to the chagrin of many – email clients, but people using modern 3CA apps/services will be able to work within their preferred and personalized contexts, all supported with a fabric of underlying infrastructure services that are likely to be cloud-based.

If an enterprise employee wants to spend their days working in email, having all work activity-related resources presented to them in that context, doing so will not entail trade-offs or endless app juggling and copying/pasting. If they instead prefer to focus on interactions and resources in workspaces, those will also have the full continuum of related capabilities and services seamlessly integrated, making it possible to stay focused on the work activities rather than underlying tools and technologies. And if some people are more singularly and serially focused on work products, such as documents, presentations, spreadsheets, or databases, they’ll be able to leverage modern productivity apps/services and hypertext content models while keeping their minds focused on their latest resource-centric projects.

Microservices-based integration frameworks will also make it possible to bring related enterprise resources seamlessly into preferred work environments, again reducing the needs for app-switching and copying/pasting (the Microservices Enterprise Level-Set TechVision Research report provides an overview of the microservices approach). The approach Salesforce has taken with Quip is a good leading indicator in this context. As demonstrated in Figure 2, Quip users focus on sales proposals or quarterly sales reports, for example, and can have related data from backend systems automatically and dynamically flow into their document contexts (where it can also be updated, if the users are authorized) without having to directly interact with underlying apps or database systems. In this respect, Salesforce has revitalized the type of work model the group of Xerox PARC alumni had in mind when they left to found Metaphor Computer Systems in 1982.

Knowledge graphs are another market dynamic that will become central to 3CA apps/services. Microsoft has a strong advantage with its Microsoft 365-populated Microsoft Graph and its LinkedIn subsidiary, but Google, with its founding mission of organizing all the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful, also has unique competitive advantages.

In addition, Microsoft and Google are both, with their respective cloud platforms and machine learning (ML) investments, poised to expand the use of machine learning models in 3CA contexts. Microsoft has already demonstrated some related capabilities in its MyAnalytics app. ML-based 3CA services will also be increasingly useful for identifying potentially related resources and proactively offering related suggestions in context.

Although enterprise-focused augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies have yet to live up to their related industry hype, the continuing development of wearables such as Apple Watch and anticipated AR smart glasses from Apple and other vendors will also have strong 3CA synergy. There will be a delicate balance between unobtrusively offering related resources in context and risking user workflow interruption (or bystander outrage, as was sometimes the case with Google Glass), but these types of wearables are likely to follow smartphones and tablets into the mainstream enterprise market.

TechVision Research Vendor Shortlist

This section includes profiles of the vendors most likely to be considered for enterprise 3CA deployments. This list is far from exhaustive, but it is a starting point to consider as you explore the 3CA domain. Note that we expect many of the smaller and specialized 3CA enterprise vendors will either be acquired by larger competitors or face significant challenges, as the 2020 pandemic-accelerated enterprise 3CA market continues to consolidate. That said, we expect massive investment in this space over the next 5 years.

Amazon: Satisfied to Host 3CA leaders on AWS?

Amazon has been primarily mentioned in conjunction with AWS so far in this report, but Amazon also has a variety of 3CA offerings including Amazon Chime for voice and video meetings, Amazon WorkDocs for file storage and sharing, and Amazon WorkMail for enterprise messaging. Amazon Honeycode, for no-code and database-driven mobile and web app development, was introduced in mid-2020 and also has 3CA potential, but its launch does not appear to have garnered much enterprise interest.

While these and other related Amazon apps/services may have some momentum within AWS customer enterprises that prefer a “one throat to choke” vendor relationship model, TechVision considers Amazon more of a potential 3CA contender due to the possibility that the company may conclude it could benefit from acquiring several smaller vendors, as the 3CA market landscape consolidation continues. Amazon’s strategic cloud platform competitive challenges relative to Google and Microsoft, which can both leverage synergy between their 3CA offerings and their cloud platforms to compete with AWS, may lead it to seek to more directly compete in the enterprise 3CA domain.

Amazon also faces a classic “co-opetition” conundrum, however, in that most of the 3CA apps/services not currently controlled by Facebook, Google, or Microsoft are likely to be hosted on AWS. With its financial leverage, Amazon could seek to acquire leading vendors such as Airtable, Atlassian, Box, Dropbox (which launched on AWS and later migrated to a private data center network), and/or Slack, but Amazon may conclude the revenues it earns by hosting many 3CA market leaders and its vibrant ecosystem of 3CA partners comprise a better strategic bet. At this point, in any case, Amazon is not, directly, a strong enterprise 3CA competitor.

Apple’s Consumer Core

Apple offers a wide range of 3CA-related apps and services that are today mostly used by consumers, primarily because Apple doesn’t offer versions of some of its key apps, such as FaceTime, Messages, and Shortcuts, on non-Apple platforms. While organizations that exclusively use Apple devices may be able to productively leverage Apple’s 3CA-related app/service suite, that’s not an option for enterprises that also use Android, Chrome OS, and/or Windows devices. Apple could quickly become a strong enterprise 3CA competitor if it were to offer all related apps/services on all leading enterprise platforms, but that’s an unlikely scenario because Apple prefers to have complete control over its customers’ end-to-end user experiences and also has little incentive to complement Android, Windows, and other competitive device platforms.

Apple Business Chat is an exception, however, and a 3CA option all enterprises seeking to directly interact with customers or partners using Apple devices should consider, in part because it’s a leading indicator of conversational and contextual collaboration capabilities that are likely to become mainstream customer interaction channels. Facebook Messenger offers similar capabilities, so enterprise microservices created to use in conjunction with Apple Business Chat can be leveraged in multiple conversational collaboration apps.

Atlassian: A Thriving Enterprise 2.0 Survivor

Founded in Australia in 2002, Atlassian started with Jira, a project- and issue-tracking app that has been very successful with development teams and has expanded to other business domains (such as general-purpose project management) in recent years. Atlassian also became a leading wiki platform competitor with its Confluence platform, introduced in 2004, and Confluence has remained a popular collaboration and content solution while other early commercial wiki platform vendors (e.g., CubeTree, JotSpot, and Socialtext) were acquired and subsumed into broader product suites.

Atlassian was an early enterprise chat competitor with HipChat, and later launched Stride, a more advanced Slack competitor, but subsequently opted for a strategic partnership with (and investment in) Slack in 2018 and retired its own chat products. Atlassian also acquired Trello in 2017, expanding its project and task management portfolio.

While Atlassian has generally been a somewhat quiet, engineering-driven company, foregoing aggressive marketing campaigns, it had grown to become a $40B public company by mid-2020, and its Slack partnership is highly complementary.

Facebook: Workplace Will not Be Weaponized…

Workplace by Facebook, announced in early 2015, includes Workplace and Workplace Chat apps that are similar to the consumer-oriented Facebook and Messenger apps, extended for organizational 3CA domains (e.g., with enterprise directory integration), and supported with a large selection of templates for common workgroup and project scenarios.

Workplace began with a set of apps and services Facebook had been using for internal company operations for many years, and while the Workplace user conceptual models expand upon Facebook’s flagship consumer apps, Workplace is a separate system. There is no way to connect consumer Facebook and Workplace accounts, for example. Workplace also includes a variety of tools for enterprise administers, and there is no advertising in Workplace.

Workplace has become popular in part because billions of people worldwide, familiar with Facebook’s consumer-oriented apps, can be immediately productive with the Workplace and Workplace Chat apps. Workplace, available in three editions, is also a relatively low-cost 3CA option. Workplace Essentials is free; Workplace Advanced (with more enterprise integration options) is $4/month per active user; and the most feature-rich version, Workplace Enterprise, is $8/month per active user. Facebook also makes Workplace Advanced freely available for non-profit organizations.

The biggest challenge Workplace by Facebook faces in enterprises today is likely to be its damaged overall company reputation during recent years, resulting from weaponization of its consumer apps/services for many types of disinformation campaigns.

Google G Suite: Now Under New Management

Google presented a strategic challenge to Microsoft’s Office business when it introduced Google Apps for Your Domain in 2006 (rebranded several times over the years, and now called G Suite), starting with enterprise-focused versions of Gmail and other 3CA apps. Aggressively priced and extended with several other apps as it evolved, G Suite became the first strategic competitor to Microsoft’s Office franchise since Microsoft vanquished more traditional productivity suite competitors Borland, Lotus, and WordPerfect in the 1990s. G Suite’s internet-centric architecture also led Microsoft to eventually offer substantive, browser-based versions of its productivity apps.

Google had the potential to disrupt additional enterprise 3CA domains (e.g., enterprise search), but the company’s overall digital advertising-focused business model and enterprise modus operandi have at times seemed to be out of step with enterprise IT customer expectations.

Google has also cycled through a long list of 3CA-related apps along the way, including Fusion Tables, Google+, Google Reader, Google Wave, and several generations of apps for chats and real-time communications, causing significant disruption for enterprises committed to G Suite. As a result, some enterprises have opted to relegate G Suite to supporting roles (usually email, calendaring/scheduling, productivity apps, and file sharing) and shifting their primary 3CA user experience focus to apps such as Slack and Workplace by Facebook.

Google’s cloud business, including G Suite, has been under new leadership since late 2018, however, and there are clear signals that Google is redoubling its focus on G Suite and its 3CA capabilities. Google introduced a newly integrated and simplified workspace model in mid-2020, for example, making it easy for G Suite users to access mail, chat, rooms (document-centric workspaces), and meetings from a streamlined Gmail app.

Microsoft: Default to Teams

Microsoft has long dominated many enterprise 3CA categories, but it has also routinely disrupted its customer and partner communities over the last quarter-century. Microsoft Exchange Server, launched in 1996, overtook Lotus Notes in enterprise messaging, for example, but Microsoft struggled to deliver competitive alternatives to other Notes features including its document-centric workspaces and integrated app development capabilities. Microsoft SharePoint was the company’s central focus for collaboration and content services for many years, but, as suggested in the Ignite 2016 slide in Figure 8, SharePoint hasn’t always been popular with end users.

Since 2016, Microsoft’s 3CA strategy has been increasingly focused on Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Azure. While Microsoft will continue to support its earlier, on-premises products for years to come, the company’s flagship 3CA apps/services are now cloud-based, complemented with both browser-based and native productivity apps (Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote) on Android, iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and Windows. Teams, as Microsoft’s flagship 3CA partner to Outlook, is only available via Microsoft’s cloud, although it can be integrated with some on-premises resources.

Microsoft has also fully embraced internet-centric architectural models, with strong support in leading browser apps and the use of open interfaces, formats, and protocols for its Microsoft Graph API. Indeed, users primarily working in Teams and SharePoint sites interact with Office documents using contextually embedded browser clients by default, and only launch the traditional, native Office apps if they need the full feature set. Excel Group Program Manager Brian Jones noted, for example, that “one of the Excel team’s key goals from FY20 was that ‘Customers can use our web app for all their work and should never feel they need to fall back to the rich client’. By ‘rich client’ I mean the Windows and Mac native desktop apps.”

Microsoft’s 2016 $26.2B LinkedIn acquisition (the largest in the company’s history, as of August 2020) provides another unique and extensive expansion of the Microsoft knowledge graph.

Overall, Microsoft’s long track record of aggressively responding to strategic competitive threats has made it the leader in the enterprise 3CA market. By becoming more internet-centric and multi-platform to compete with G Suite, and by investing billions of dollars in Azure and shifting its flagship products to cloud-first, mobile-first solutions with pervasively integrated social capabilities, to compete with AWS and Slack, Microsoft can now leverage Office and its three cloud platforms – Azure, Dynamics 365, and Microsoft 365 – when competing for the full spectrum of enterprise 3CA opportunities.

Slack: Unlikely to Be Netscaped

In hindsight, it might seem improbable that Slack was able to transform a reimplementation of IRC, admittedly with modern mobile apps, a globally scalable architecture on AWS, and a vibrant community of integration partners, into an enterprise 3CA leadership role. Slack was broadly deployed by the time Microsoft introduced Teams in late 2016, however, and its approximately $16B market cap, by mid-2020, provided the company with a lot of leverage for expansion. Slack’s highly complementary partnership with Atlassian is another key consideration in the broader enterprise 3CA competitive landscape.

Slack filed a competition complaint with the EU in July 2020, essentially arguing that Microsoft was attempting to do to Slack, by bundling Teams with Microsoft 365, what it successfully did to Netscape in the 1990s, when it bundled Internet Explorer in Windows. The complaint was a significant shift from Slack’s cheeky 2016 “Dear Microsoft” NYT advertisement, responding to the launch of Microsoft Teams (in a fashion reminiscent of Apple’s notorious “Welcome, IBM. Seriously” ad in 1981, after IBM introduced the IBM PC).

Ironically, Microsoft had, a month before the Slack EU complaint about Teams, similarly complained to the EU about Apple allegedly abusing its monopoly control of its App Store. Perhaps Apple’s epic resurgence since 1996, after being competitively crushed by Microsoft in the PC market, will serve as an inspiration to Slack’s leaders as they adapt to their top-tier position in Microsoft’s list of strategic competitors.

It’s also possible Slack will be acquired by a larger Microsoft competitor such as Amazon or Google, or that some of the smaller 3CA players may find a way to merge (e.g., Atlassian, Slack, and Zoom). In any case, it’s unlikely Slack will be vanquished by Microsoft as both Apple and Netscape were in the 1990s.

Zoom: A Pandemic-Accelerated 3CA Phenomenon

The phenomenal 2020 growth of Zoom Video Communications, founded in 2011, is perhaps the biggest 3CA surprise in recent years. There had been a paradox of abundance of audio and video conferencing apps/services for many years, with Apple, Cisco, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and many others offering related capabilities at low (or no) cost, but Zoom rode the 2020 pandemic to a disruptive competitive position, despite having to detour for some security enhancements along the way.

Zoom is now in the enviable position of having an “it just works” category-leading product, large and loyal customer and partner communities, incredible financial leverage, virtually unlimited scalability by virtue of running primarily on AWS, and several attractive options for product family expansion.

Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have responded to Zoom’s rapid rise with enhancements to their competing apps and services but Zoom appears to be firmly in control of its destiny, at least for now.

Other 3CA Incumbents and Potential Contenders

HCL Software, a division of HCL Technologies (an Indian IT services and consulting company), acquired most of IBM’s 3CA product line in 2019. Despite having access to IBM’s global sales and professional services teams, the Notes, Domino, Sametime, and Connections product lines had mostly languished after IBM acquired Lotus Development Corp. in 1995, and it’s possible HCL will be able to rebuild some momentum for the product family.

It’s highly unlikely HCL will be able to reclaim the enterprise messaging market leadership role Notes enjoyed in the 1990s, but the integrated 3CA architecture in Notes remains productive for remaining Notes customers and business partners, and HCL’s investments in the product family may at least slow migrations to competitive alternatives.

Salesforce is another major vendor with a strong 3CA value proposition. Its 2016 acquisition of Quip provided a modern productivity app foundation in which Salesforce can integrate its line-of-business app suite with streamlined contextual activities (such as the example in Figure 2).

Beyond the enterprise 3CA vendors referenced in this section, several incumbent 3CA vendors are likely to become acquisition candidates, pivot their value propositions to more custom solutions than traditional 3CA products, or exit the 3CA domain.

Cisco, IBM, and Oracle are the biggest 3CA incumbents that are likely to redouble their focus on solution-based opportunities, integrating their line-of-business apps and professional services-created solutions with the leading 3CA apps/services rather than attempting to directly compete with the new wave of 3CA leaders.

In terms of potential contenders, it’s likely, considering current market dynamics, that any future breakout start-ups in the 3CA domain are likely to be acquired. One contender that can’t be acquired, however, is the option of focusing primarily on open source projects rather than commercial vendors.

The book Practical Internet Groupware, published by Jon Udell in 1999, made a compelling case for the option of using internet standard-based open source projects to address enterprise 3CA requirements. Most enterprises instead opted for traditional commercial product alternatives, and, as a result, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft now control many of the underlying infrastructure services used in conjunction with leading 3CA apps (e.g., identity, authentication, and authorization), much as Apple, Facebook, and Google control corresponding infrastructure services in the consumer market.

There is a possibility that some enterprises, however, will opt to reduce their reliance on the leading enterprise 3CA vendors and seek to regain more direct control by leveraging distributed infrastructure projects such as the W3C Solid project, which provides the foundation for commercial implementations such as Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s inrupt.

Matrix is another case study in this context. Quoting from the Matrix project home page: “Matrix is an open source project that publishes the Matrix open standard for secure, decentralized, real-time communication, and its Apache licensed reference implementations.” Element is one example of a commercial vendor building on Matrix. TechVision will explore these next-generation internet distributed infrastructure directions in future reports.

There is no question that current market dynamics suggest the leading enterprise 3CA vendors will continue gaining momentum, but related open source projects also warrant monitoring and consideration, especially for enterprises that don’t want to be deeply dependent on Amazon, Google, and/or Microsoft for 3CA-related infrastructure services and apps.

Conclusion and Recommendations

The shift to work through contextual activities presents significant opportunities for enterprises to help employees become more productive and responsive by focusing on work activities in their preferred app contexts rather than endlessly juggling large collections of communication, collaboration, and content apps. The transition is also likely to improve employee job satisfaction, as it in many ways means adapting tools and techniques that have proven exceptionally effective in the consumer domain to enterprise work routines.

The rest of this section includes high-level recommendations for enterprise planners seeking to leverage the new 3CA opportunities. Subsequent TechVision reports will provide more detailed guidance on the leading enterprise 3CA vendors and products, including Microsoft 365, Google G Suite, Workplace by Facebook, and popular combinations of smaller 3CA specialists such as Atlassian, Slack, and Zoom.

Keep Work Activities Out of the Inbox

Email is not going away anytime soon, and it is possible to leverage contextual activities from within email apps, but the enterprise 3CA focus for work activities has shifted to apps such as Microsoft Teams and Slack. They share a communication channel-centered model that can be easily and seamlessly integrated with other apps/services, facilitating conversational collaboration as well as the ability to embed hypertext views of related work.

Email is still useful for ad hoc and interpersonal communication, but the overall fire-and-forget model and personal inbox filing associated with email are (and always have been) suboptimal for group collaboration.

Providing clear guidance on which app/service to use for specific communication, collaboration, and content activities is now a critical enterprise 3CA success factor. Left to their personal preferences, many employees will continue to work primarily via email and traditional meetings and may only use a small subset of the capabilities in modern apps such as Teams and Slack, reducing their productivity and job satisfaction.

Plan for Enterprise 3CA Cloud-Centric Consolidation

The shift to contextual activities, closely aligned with the ongoing shift to cloud platforms, is going to disrupt many traditional enterprise 3CA vendors. This is important to consider when deciding on your partners in this space. IBM is the most obvious example, having lost its early enterprise 3CA lead (with Notes and Sametime) and ultimately selling its related product lines to HCL.

Cisco is another enterprise incumbent increasingly challenged in the 3CA domain, especially since the Cisco WebEx team alumni who left Cisco in 2011 to create Zoom saw the 2020 pandemic-related dynamics propel their company to a global leadership position in web conferencing, a starting point they are now leveraging to deliver a multifaceted set of communication-related apps and services. With a market cap more than 45% of Cisco’s as of late August 2020, Zoom also has significant financial leverage with which to accelerate its strategy by acquiring other leading 3CA vendors.

Oracle made multiple attempts to become an enterprise 3CA leader over the last few decades, trying unsuccessfully several times to compete with Lotus Notes in the early groupware days and garnering little momentum in products designed to extend its database management market position into content management (especially when XML was expected to be the next big thing in enterprise content management). At this point, Oracle customers are likely to be more interested in having Oracle integrate its app suites with 3CA apps and services from Microsoft and Google than they would be in having Oracle make another attempt to become a leading 3CA competitor on its own.

Microsoft and Google are the strongest full spectrum 3CA enterprise incumbents today, and both have made massive investments in their cloud product families and supporting data centers. Enterprises focused primarily on AWS are likely to find AWS-hosted 3CA leaders such as Atlassian, Slack, and Zoom attractive.

Although the market transition from proprietary platforms, apps, and services to the open and internet-centric world facilitates more flexible multi-vendor scenarios, there are still important vendor product line synergy issues to consider. With Microsoft 365, for example, many of Microsoft’s 3CA apps both contribute to and leverage the Microsoft Graph, and Google is likely to extend G Suite with many of the Google Knowledge Graph capabilities it currently leverages in its consumer-oriented apps and services.

There are also some significant gaps to consider for multi-vendor deployments. When documents and other resources are saved in storage services from multiple vendors, for example, it can be an “actual results may vary” scenario for search, collaborative authoring, and other activities. There are specialist software vendors focused on this type of multi-system search challenge, but most enterprise employees are accustomed to the reality that their employer-provided search options are typically very limited, in comparison with the ones they use every day on the consumer internet (mostly Google). This is a domain with ample room for improvement, but the incumbent vendors have little incentive to address multi-vendor deployment challenges, if the alternative is for their enterprise customers to further consolidate resources under the control of a single vendor.

Overall, the enterprise 3CA market is unlikely to become a winner-takes-all competitive landscape, and most enterprises will continue with a multi-vendor 3CA strategy for the foreseeable future, but the battle to serve as the primary client environment for contextual activities, with Microsoft, Google, Slack, and Facebook currently best positioned to compete, is going to be intense, and second-tier competitors are going to face daunting challenges.

Amid the consolidation, the enterprise 3CA market is creating significant opportunities for integration and migration. Most enterprises have accumulated large collections of 3CA products and platforms, including product categories such as enterprise content management, intranets, web content management, and a variety of workflow tools that predated the shift to the contextual activity model.

The shift to a more internet-centric and beyond-the-basics hypertext content model is a big departure from earlier file and document management traditions. While static, print-centric documents will still be required for some record-keeping contexts, those types of traditional documents are now the exception rather than the norm, with more work taking place via contextual activities with seamlessly integrated and advanced hypertext user experiences.

As such, enterprises planning to migrate to new 3CA platforms should resist the temptation to do a simple lift-and-shift migration and should instead take advantage of the transition to inventory their current 3CA resources, consolidating and optimizing the resources for modern 3CA models.

A final integration-related note: multi-party integration remains a challenge when disparate 3CA apps are used. If an enterprise (or a group within an enterprise) using Microsoft Teams needs to communicate, collaborate, and share content with another that’s using Slack, for example, there is no easy way to make it possible for all parties to share while continuing to use all of the capabilities of their preferred app. It is possible to use services such as IFTTT and Zapier to synchronize some 3CA activities, for example, but the path of least resistance, for the immediate future, is likely to be to be having one of the parties add members of the other party as guests to their preferred system.

Refactor to Enable Contextual Activities

Making application and content resources available for contextual activities often requires refactoring. While it is possible to embed browser-based views of traditional apps within apps such as Teams and Slack, that merely saves users a bit of window-switching, and it’s not as seamless or work-focused as contextual activities. Similarly, the ability to have activity-focused collaborative conversations in chat apps requires having app and content resources that can be robustly leveraged in context.

This is another domain in which Apple’s platforms and apps provide a useful leading indicator. Apple’s human interface guidelines for sharing and actions describe the iOS app integration model, for example, making it possible for iOS app developers to make services and app clips from their apps available in contexts such as Apple’s share sheet and when defining actions in Apple Shortcuts. Apple’s app clips framework provides another example of surfacing app capabilities in user experience contexts beyond traditional monolithic apps.

Overall, to make contextual activities more useful for non-trivial work scenarios, enterprises need to move beyond the traditional app architecture, using microservices to make app capabilities robustly and securely available in 3CA contexts.

Follow the Leaders

As the Apple references in the previous recommendation suggest, the leading consumer-oriented devices, apps, and services are often leading indicators of future enterprise 3CA patterns. Apple’s end-to-end control of its hardware, software, and services provides a unique “walled garden” in which Apple can define and enforce architectural policies. Apple and its app community have jointly leveraged their partnership to deliver a wide range of innovations that create powerful contextual activity opportunities.

Similarly, as described in the “pizza near me” Google search result example earlier in this report, Google’s consumer-oriented user experience models and knowledge graph also provide useful leading indicators of likely future mainstream enterprise 3CA patterns.

The fact that enterprise employees are familiar with the leading-edge consumer 3CA apps and services is another important consideration, as employees who routinely leverage modern consumer-oriented 3CA capabilities are likely to be most productive when they have access to similar apps and services at work. As previously mentioned, this type of consumer cross-over holds uniquely strong enterprise potential for Facebook, as people who have experience with the Facebook and Messenger consumer apps can be immediately productive with Facebook’s enterprise-oriented Workplace and Workplace Chat app counterparts.

Don’t Be Creepy

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt used the term “creepy line” when discussing Google’s use of personal information gleaned from its consumer-oriented services; the creepy line was the threshold at which an ordinary user would find Google’s use of their information unacceptable. Schmidt also commented, in 2010, that “The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.” Note that the creepy line is also under increasing government scrutiny, with GDPR, CCPA, and many other privacy and data protection regulations making it costly for enterprises to cross the line. TechVision has published several reports on these topics.

The availability of modern enterprise 3CA apps and services, along with supporting resources such as enterprise knowledge graphs, and especially when combined with employee profile and activity data managed in human resources systems and available via popular services such as LinkedIn, has the potential to be very creepy.

Real-time, multi-party speech capture and transcription apps/services such as Otter.ai also have creepy potential if used with inadequate planning and transparency (e.g., informing employees when conversations are recorded and transcribed). If you work for an enterprise that fully leverages Microsoft 365 and a tool such as Otter.ai, for example, you can assume every action you take, every information resource  you create, read, update, or delete, and every meeting or other discussion in which you’re a participant may be recorded, transcribed, and added to an enterprise knowledge graph. Compared to that type of surveillance scenario, the personal monitoring and metrics currently provided in Microsoft MyAnalytics seem quaintly conservative.

Enterprises need to be proactive and transparent in related policies, ensuring employees understand all aspects of their activities that may be recorded, harvested, and applied in workforce analytics. It’s also likely government regulations will be increasingly stringent in this context, and that’s perhaps one of the reasons Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and other enterprise 3CA vendors have been relatively conservative about promoting the extent to which surveillance techniques used on the consumer internet can be leveraged within enterprises.

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