SAP 12Sprints - yet another Google Wave for Enterprise

Collaboration is not the primary specialization of SAP, so the appearance of 12Sprints, an enterprise Google Wave alternative, is pretty surprising. Even more surprising is that 12Sprints - is a SaaS application, and SAP is not very good in this sphere. As you know, their primary SaaS solution, Business ByDesign - is delayed for almost 3 years because of the SaaS platform problems. Unlike it, 12Sprints quickly entered the public beta stage (and everyone can use it) that is also very unusual for SAP. Usually they provide only Powerpoint presentations without screenshots. So SAP is making progress in this new field, though 12Sprints in general loses in comparison to Google Wave.

12Sprints' "wave" is called "activity". This is a place for collaboration in real time (though in case with 12Sprints - time is not so real. Changes appear with a slight delay). In the "activity", you can add text messages, tables, lists, discussion, pictures and files. All these items are placed in chronological order - like blog posts. For each post you can add comments, activities (like in Basecamp) and references to other posts. You can also add Webex meetings, Evernote pages, as well as specialized tools, like SWOT analysis. Developers can create their own tools.


In general, compared to Google Wave, 12Sprints is more structured. This makes it less flexible and its interface looks even more complicated than Google Wave. Of course, SAP will position 12Sprints, as more business-oriented solution (than Google Wave), but in this niche there are also enough competitors like Novell Pulse and Salesforce Chatter.