Ten Reasons Why 'Enterprise RSS' Has Failed To Become Mainstream

The recent article from ReadWriteWeb, in which they declared Enterprise RSS "dead," is interesting in that it does call out a dark truth - enterprise adoption of feed syndication tools has been lacking.
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However, the article disappoints because it gives too much credit to feed readers as the reason. I wish it was that easy. There are a host of reasons to help explain why Enterprise RSS has not taken off yet - as opposed to actually having 'died.'

R.I.P. Enterprise RSS - ReadWriteWeb

It's with a heavy heart and a sense of bewilderment that we conclude that the market for enterprise-specific RSS readers appears to be dead. Two years ago there were three major players offering software that delivered information to the computers of business users via RSS. Today it looks to us like the demand simply never arose and that market is over.

A smattering of employees in big companies are using the free consumer app Google Reader, a paltry substitute for a business class RSS reader, and the rest of the business world is apparently satisfied to get information whenever they happen to stumble over it. It's insane - a solid RSS strategy can be a huge competitive advantage in any field. We have no idea why so relatively few people see that.

We love RSS and this makes us really sad. If much of the rest of the world wants to ignore this technology, though, it's their loss. It's our bread and butter. Neglecting RSS at work seems to us like pure insanity.

The first concept to understand is that the key focus point for Enterprise RSS is not the reader - it is the feed syndication platform (the server back-end) that provides centralized administration, feed management and other services (e.g., synchronization of read/unread marks, de-duping of redundant feed items, etc). These platforms are not cheap - enterprise deals can average six-figures. Sure, people may not want to pay for a feed reader when there are so many free ones available but that is really not the primary obstacle, it is just one of several. Here is a list of reasons I have come up with that categorize what I hear from enterprise clients in this area:

1. A lot of intranets are "content poor" (why subscribe if there's nothing of interest?)
2. Intranet web site owners have not made their sites "RSS-friendly"
3. Employees may not know about feed readers and feed syndication (an awareness, education and training issue)
4. IT organizations might not have rolled out any tools that focus on RSS
5. In tools that support RSS as a feature, IT might not have "turned on" that capability (e.g., via administration/policy management settings)
6. Employees may be unwilling to change their behaviors to take advantage of feed readers (if they have been rolled out)
7. IT organizations may look at feeds as increasing their attack surface area in terms of security (e.g., malware)
8. Business and IT decision-makers may be concerned about confidentiality and compliance aspects of feed syndication
9. IT organizations may be concerned about network utilization and their inability to manage bandwidth concerns
10. Justification for back-end servers to aggregate and management feeds centrally (i.e., a feed syndication platform) lacks a clear business case

This list is just a start - I could easily go on... (feeds might be used to deliver content to a site (corporate portal) without readers even being aware that the information they are viewing comes from a collection of back-end feeds - no large vendor has a feed syndication platform re: IBM, Microsoft or Oracle which might make some IT folks uneasy about relying on a small vendor for essential middleware).

Like many others, I am surprised/disappointed that this market has not hit its stride yet. I think it will take about two years before we see it, unfortunately. This is a classic middleware chicken-and-egg problem. Right now, why should people deploy an expensive middleware layer when the ROI is not clear and the pain has not reached a critical mass?

That said, I have always felt that feed syndication platforms constitute the backbone for social software/Enterprise 2.0 tools. This space remains one of the most critical architectural areas for enterprise strategists - it touches on everything organizations are doing with blogs, wikis, tagging and social bookmarking systems, and social networking. Feed syndication platforms will likely play a supporting role when microblogging tools are introduced as well. These platforms can also help with syndicating information from operational systems (more data-centric). The emerging concept of activity streams (which I conceptually refer to as "social presence") will also benefit from such middleware. Kind of "way out," there is also an interesting potential touch point between feed syndication platforms, analytics, alert/notification and complex event processing.

Bottom Line: It is not dead - it is still being born...

Article originally published at Collaborative Thinking.

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BY Mike Gotta
Source：Social Computing Magazine

Mike Gotta has been in the computer industry since 1980. He's an industry analyst since 1996, first with META Group and since July 2005, with Burton Group as a Principal Analyst. Over the years he's covered a wide range of topics but collaboration has always been my most passionate area of interest.

Mike Gotta studies:
- Organizational, social and human capital management dynamics related to communication, information sharing and collaboration issues.
- Improving business performance and organizational productivity through communication and collaboration strategies.
- Knowledge management trends, including community-building methods and practices
- Various technologies including blogs, tagging, social bookmarks, social networking, XML syndication (RSS, Atom, OPML), microformats, presence, instant messaging and web conferencing.