Microsoft gets another competitor in SoftBank

Microsoft has enough trouble competing against software rivals like IBM and Google in the enterprise market. Now it has to worry about a phone company eating its lunch.

The Enterprise 2

At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference I covered earlier this week in Santa Clara, Calif., a company called BroadVision introduced the latest version of its Clearvale platform for enabling companies to set up social networking environments built around their business, creating a community of its employees, partners and customers. Among BroadVision's early customers is SoftBank Telecom, the fixed-line phone company part of the SoftBank Corp., which also includes mobile and broadband businesses. The Clearvale platform allows enterprises to also deliver commercial services to customers and Softbank plans to do that for its customers, Giovanni Rodriguez, BroadVision's chief marketing officer, told me.

The publicly-traded BroadVision's platform-as-a-service offering, called PaaSPort, enables companies to offer corporate e-mail, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning and other enterprise software on top of the social networking service, Rodriguez said. SoftBank sees this as an opportunity to advance itself as a communications company, not just a phone company.

"SoftBank wants to compete with Microsoft. They have declared it," Rodriguez said. "Microsoft has a stranglehold on communications and productivity applications inside the enterprise."

And talk about synergy, another SoftBank business, SoftBank Mobile, has begun selling the Apple iPad in Japan and already sells the iPhone. Rodriquez sees the potential for SoftBank to sell iPads running SoftBank unified communications apps to enterprise customers, a foothold Apple may have on only an employee-by-employee basis now.

The BroadVision news release

SoftBank only hinted at its designs on Microsoft's business in the BroadVision news release. "BroadVision's vision of the 'social business cloud' -- a world where employees, partners, and customers can freely connect and collaborate with one another -- is both timely and compelling," said Ken Miyauchi, chief operations officer of SoftBank Telecom.

And, of course, SoftBank wouldn't be the first company to be both a partner and a competitor to another company. SoftBank BB, the broadband business of SoftBank Corp, partnered with Microsoft and Japan Telecom in 2005, to bring to market a variety of IP services, including Voice over IP (VoIP), Internet access, e-mail as well as hosted versions of Microsoft Server, SharePoint and the like.