CollabNet, the company we founded six years ago with Brian Behlendorf to build tools to support open-source style collaborative development processes, just announced their first on-demand software offering, CollabNet Team Edition. The company’s had a lot of success in enterprise software sales, but this is the first time they’ve tried a salesforce.com-style web application offering.
In all my talks about Web 2.0, I’ve been saying that google, amazon, eBay and the like tell us a more general story about the future of software. So far, the big wins (apart from salesforce.com) have been consumer-facing web applications. But increasingly, enterprise software is going the same route: customer self-service. The question is, do companies understand what makes these kinds of applications work? In the first generation of on-demand software, there were a lot of missteps. But the trend is definitely re-emerging.