While not causing quite as big a buzz as the recent announced acquisition of Sun, Oracle made more headlines this week with some interesting social networking and integration enhancements to its Beehive collaboration platform. In addition, the company announced it has a new cloud-based version and slashed prices. Oliver Marks gives a nice review of the announcement in his Collaboration 2.0 blog.

What makes this buzzworthy is not so much the splash created by the announcement – it wasn’t much of a splash really - but the implied directions and continued investments Oracle is making in the Enterprise 2.0 collaboration space. It looks like Oracle is finally making a serious attempt to compete with Microsoft’s Sharepoint server, which as Dion Hinchcliffe recently points out, is being deployed by quite a number of enterprises today. The upgrade and low cost make for a much more interesting play this time around against Sharepoint and with features such as “Web-based team workspaces” and other social networking-esque components built with enterprise-grade security and compliance. And it looks like Beehive now has integrated voice and web conferencing.

This is yet another indication of a serious shift among enterprises to embrace social Web, community and collaboration. And it runs the gamut – you’ve got Beehive and companies like SuccessFactors building Facebook-style features to small CRM vendors incorporating social CRM and community, a “MySpace for the office” approach into their systems. We at Helpstream believe social Web technologies, community and collaboration should be an integral part of a company’s business processes, especially when it comes to how to engage and support customers. Today’s consumers simply engage differently now– it’s the time of Facebook, Twitter, Yammer and micro-blogging. Companies need to respond to that call with community-based technologies. Companies like InfusionSoft who believe this, take advantage of it and embed it into their businesses are engaging customers in ways that matter and drive substantial ROI.

Lastly I find it very interesting that the new Beehive announcement talks explicitly about the ability to scale and integrate with existing vendors a company might already be using (i.e. Companies that have invested for years in MSFT: Don’t worry, you can use Beehive in conjunction with it). Overhauling systems and “switching” can be a nightmare, so Beehive is taking the smart approach of working together with other vendors' solutons to produce a complete fully-integrated suite that works for them. This is much like the approach we at Helpstream have taken with our integrations with Oracle CRM OnDemand and Salesforce.com. In this economic environment companies are not looking to rip and replace, but they are looking for ways to intelligently extend and enhance current systems.