We’ve continued to hear concern about IBM’s viability as an alternative to Exchange for on-premise systems, by going to the cloud IBM leverages the economics of the cloud to bolster its competitive position.

Google did say it would continue development of Wave, but instead seek to integrate it into its other applications. As a model for future collaboration, Wave did make a wave. But its greatest impact will be to drive co-authoring capabilities into other collaboration applications.

Microsoft last week announced a connector between Microsoft Outlook, and profile information in Facebook. The service works by matching a user’s e-mail address to their Facebook profile. So if one of your contacts in Outlook is on Facebook, you will see whatever information is publicly available from their profile within Outlook (or whatever information you can access if you are “friends”). Microsoft previously announced a similar integration between Outlook at LinkedIn.

Microsoft’s move creates new challenges for organizations trying to balance the need to embrace the world of social software with concerns over security, compliance, privacy and productivity. Our 2010 benchmark of over 200 companies shows that 40% block access to public social sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, but often are forced to back off blanket bans due to employee demand or business justifications to participate in public social communities. Meanwhile, only 23% have a formal social strategy.

Allowing employees to engage with public social networks can provide real benefits in terms of building personal relationships with customers, partners, and suppliers, but of course carries risk and must be implemented with respect to information protection requirements (See Socialware’s recently released Guide to Facebook Social Networking Compliance).

We continue to spend a lot of time working with our clients to try and help them balance the need for openness with the reality of governance. Enterprise managers should take efforts by Microsoft and others to poke holes in the social firewall as further justification for a proactive enterprise social strategy.

For the last few years the social product landscape has been centered on delivering applications that provided specific uses or functionalities. For example; blogs, wikis, microblogs, discussion forums, etc. Over time stand-alone applications have merged into social computing suites such as Newsgator social sites, Jive SBS, and Socialtext.

Now, we’re seeing the next wave: Social computing in the context of organizational applications and processes. The first shot across the bow was Salesforce.com’s Chatter, introduced a few months ago as a social application that is baked into Salesforce’s CRM; meaning employees could leverage social collaboration tools directly from within the application they were already using. We’ve seen other examples such as integration of public social network connectors into Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange. Recently Jive demonstrated integration of SBS with SAP at this year’s SAPPHIRE NOW event in Orlando.

Vendors at Enterprise 2.0 took this concept one step further with announcements from Cisco, Jive, and Socialtext not only enhanced collaboration/social platforms (Quad, SBS 4.5, and Socialtext 4.0 respectively), but new APIs and developer support to interface these social tools with business process applications. Initially this means a greater ability to collaborate in the context of specific reports, management information, or ERP applications.

Longer term, I expect we’ll see collaboration flow the opposite way; so as with Salesforce chatter, social tools will be available within business application interfaces as well as within stand-alone social suites. This presents some challenges for those responsible for social strategy. It’s possible that rather than deploying an enterprise-wide social platform, the challenge becomes to integrate various islands of social applications that are wrapped into business process tools to enable common search, profile management, and administration. Perhaps we’ll see OpenSocial become the de-facto tool for interconnecting these islands.

Another aspect of this trend is a requirement for greater communication between collaboration planners and application developers. One of the key trends we’ve highlighted in our recent research is growing integration of those responsible for voice, messaging, and video with those responsible for social software, now that group will need to include internal application development resources who can leverage these new integration capabilities.

What we’re seeing is a maturation of the social computing landscape. It’s no longer about “which cool new tool can I deploy” but how can I leverage these tools to improve the overall ability of those within and outside my organization to communicate and collaborate.

SAP Co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe’s keynote this morning highlighted a new “Chatter-like” activity stream within CRM On-Demand. Jim called this “Facebook for the Enterprise”, which is one of the more beaten-to-death marketing slogans, but activity streams within the SalesOnDemand UI gives field sales personnel the ability to engage in chats and share information tied to specific accounts and opportunities. Like Salesforce.com Chatter, this new capability is tied into the workspace that sales people already use, meaning that it doesn’t require learning a whole new interface or deploying a new application. Rather, the activity stream simply adds additional value to an existing application.

Earlier I had a chance to sit down with David Meyer, SAP’s SVP Business Insight and Emerging Technologies and see a demo of Streamwork, SAP’s new collaboration tool for group decision making. Like On-Demand’s activity stream, Streamwork can integrate with existing SAP applications to enable discussions around specific contexts, such as reports, projects, or business processes. As a cloud-based service, Streamwork is especially effective for supporting external collaboration, a key activity for SAP customers across a range of verticals or processes such as supply chain management.

The entry of companies like Salesforce and SAP into the Enterprise 2.0 space poses significant risks to stand-alone social computing vendors who don’t have the same level of integration into the applications companies use to run their business. But there are also partnership opportunities as Jive’s presence here at SAPPHIRENOW demonstrates. It will be interesting to watch the continued integration of social applications into enterprise BI and ERP systems.