It was always going to happen sooner rather than later. Apparently Alcatel<\/A> has decided to go with MT for an intranet site, and one of the losers in this case, so Loic claims<\/A>, is Lotus QuickPlace.<\/P> RedMonk has been arguing<\/A> for a while that portal, content management and collaboration players will all be impacted by a new generation of lightweight syndication service-enabled frameworks. The Alcatel case is only one small departmental deal, and is certainly not clear evidence of a broad trend, but it does represent outlier evidence.<\/P> Lotus is certainly positioned to respond<\/A> to turbulence in the market, and could well spin a deal with MT as a partnering opportunity going forward. IBM and Microsoft are both at cultural and technical inflexion points with regard to their collaboration, messaging and presence strategies, though, which will create opportunities for new players. Firms like Zimbra<\/A>, building the first mail and calendar program I know of built from the ground up around server-side indexing and open source AJAX<\/A>, which is aiming to become the “enterprise gmail”. Stephen is quite enamoured of Hula<\/A>, led by Novell.<\/P> But back to the syndication question.<\/P>