Some interesting insights are emerging from Corante<\/A>, the blog media and research company. Suw Charman has audited a recent win<\/A> by tractionsoftware in the European pharmaceutical sector. <\/P> The project was for an internal blog, behind the firewall, integrated with existing enterprise directories. Very little if any end user training was required, which is key. <\/P> One other thing that struck me is the fact that this is another case of a blogging platform beating Lotus in a competitive situation. I recently pointed to a Moveable Type win at Acatel, also against Lotus<\/A>. <\/P> I should stress again that this is an outlier rather than a full-blown trend. On the other hand, it should become increasingly clear to IBM, Microsoft and other content management, portal and collaboration players, that something is afoot. As RedMonk has argued before, blogs and wikis can in many cases functionally replace large scale content management and messaging platforms.<\/P> Does Lotus have some native advantages? Of course it does, not least its end to end auditability for compliance and corporate governance. But in unmanaged spaces, rather than heavily managed ones, blogs and wikis are an obvious solution to ad-hoc collaboration.<\/P> So while blogs are competing with messaging and collaboration platforms, so blog media companies are competing with industry analyst firms. As I said the other day, the tundra is breaking up<\/A>.<\/P> If you are an enterprise considering lightweight approaches to ad-hoc collaboration who are you going to\/should you call? I would contend Corante is going to be there in the mix. Its certainly a more obvious place to look for information about blogs in business than Gartner, say. So, anyone for Corante Consulting; it can only be a matter of time… Of course RedMonk would be more than happy to help with issues in this space; we have a public track record in the social software and community development spaces.<\/P> RedMonk has not been briefed by Traction Software<\/A> though, so if you’re reading why not get in touch.<\/P>