Interesting readings from this week

Here are a few interesting readings from this week.

To start with, Bill Ives lists the best Enterprise 2.0 success stories he has collected during 2007. Read and get inspired.

In Information World Review, Phil Muncaster writes about research that show a trend of "increasing resources for council IT departments and greater influence for chief information officers". He refers to the Forrester vice president Alex Cullen and writes:

"IT leaders will seek to more closely integrate their departments with the wider business by sending smaller groups into different business areas to act as specialist technology advisers...//...There is also a great opportunity for so-called “change agent” IT chiefs to take advantage of their insight into line-of-business and functional silos in order to become trusted advisers to the board, argued Cullen."

There has, of course, been much buzz this week following Microsofts aquisition of FAST, the Norwegian enterprise search firm. As SharePoint user, I personally welcome this aquisition (yes, I am not too happy about the current SharePoint Search). Guy Creese at Burton Group splits the search market into three sectors:

"(1) cheap and OK, (2) relatively inexpensive and an 80% solution, and (3) expensive and sophisticated, Microsoft is targeting tier two with SharePoint Search".

He concludes that the list of competitors in enterprise search is getting smaller and smaller (Autonomy, Oracle, IBM and Google besides Microsoft).