Revving Up The SharePoint Engine

For policy management, SharePoint includes functions for all the different parties involved in the process: One group creates the policy, another group reviews it and adds their comments, another party will revise it and then it's passed on for final approval and published out to the organization.

"Until now, this has been handled by spending a million dollars to buy a packaged application or build a custom application, or by using a combination of e-mail and file shares," Roshfeld said.

Mauro Cardarelli, a managing partner at Jornata, a Boston-based services company that specializes in customizing and implementing SharePoint, says that business intelligence is another potentially lucrative revenue stream that ISVs have yet to tap into. "In this scenario, companies could use SharePoint as the presentation tier for business intelligence data and be able to show data through graphs and charts," he said.

Web parts, or components that let organizations collect information and customize the look and feel of Web pages, are another area in which SharePoint ISVs are seeing interest. Michael Tanner, CEO of Bamboo Solutions, a SharePoint ISV in Reston, Va., says Web parts can be used to build functions such as alert management and calendaring into SharePoint.

"There are also Web parts that focus on rolling out information, in the form of lists, for example. They aggregate the information and build them out in hierarchies," Tanner said.

ISVs are beginning to realize that the ability to bring content into SharePoint from other systems is one of the strongest aspects of the platform, Quest Software's Davis said.

"SharePoint lends itself nicely to bringing data into it, and we're seeing a robust ISV ecosystem developing around content migration from Lotus Notes and a variety of document-management systems," he said.

But with all the data being pumped into SharePoint, the need to protect that data becomes even greater. That's why backup and disaster recovery are becoming high growth areas for SharePoint ISVs such as AvePoint, which has leveraged that market trend to its advantage.

"One thing we've done to differentiate ourselves is to fill in additional areas around SharePoint that require special tools," said Andrew Young, director of product marketing at AvePoint, Jersey City, N.J. "For example, in addition to backup and recovery, there are opportunities around centralized administration and content replication. Adding those really increases the breadth of the solution."

In the past six months, larger organizations have been moving decisively toward deploying SharePoint through their networks as they wake up to the platform's potential, according to Roshfeld. "There are a lot of organizations that have owned SharePoint previously but didn't deploy it, but now we're starting to see widespread rollouts," he said.

Companies also like the fact that SharePoint is geared toward a rapid development model that represents a departure from conventional enterprise applications, Roshfeld noted. "One of the classic problems with enterprise software has been that as you start down the path of deploying a large back-end system, by the time you get it up and running, it's outdated. The big difference with SharePoint is it doesn't take years to learn and develop on it," Roshfeld said.

ISVs that work with SharePoint believe the platform has only just begun to realize its potential, not just for application development, but also as a catalyst in the market for collaboration solutions.

"There has been a lot of talk and promotion of collaboration for years, but the majority of companies have thus far been on the sidelines," Bamboo's Tanner said. "What SharePoint does is take the risk out of the equation, which means you don't have to go with something that's big and deep."

And while some organizations are using only the basic portal functionality of SharePoint, ISVs believe that once they get their hands on the product and start developing on the platform, the concept of SharePoint being primarily a tool for collaboration will disappear.

"I think the world thinks of SharePoint mainly as a portal, but when you look at the direction in which it's moving, SharePoint is really an enterprise operating system," Tanner said.