SuiteTwo vs. Blogtronix Smackdown Part II

Few months ago, when Intel announced the SuiteTwo, the media went wild, the bloggers blogged, and I could not understand what was the big deal. Jerry Bowles than noted my comments and posted his posts about our Smackdown with SuiteTwo and Intel.

Two weeks ago during the Web 2.0 Expo I finally was able to check the SuiteTwo offering in person and also I was able to talk to the sales people from Intel (or Spike) I am not sure.

So, I am not going to bore you again that Blogtronix was the original company to combine blogs with wikis, RSS, and Social Networking with enterprise focus on the market early 2005. This was almost two years before Intel Capital borrowed our original idea from a VC meeting I had with them in the Fall of 2005. Back than Intel dismissed us and did not believe that people will pay for this. Or at least this is what they told me.

During the demo I got at the web 2.0 Expo ( I wore my Vassil Mladjov, Blogtronix badge) all my big prediction about technological problems SuiteTwo will have, were confirmed!

1. SuiteTwo is one big MishMash. Not a Mashup. (In Bulgarian, MishMash means an omelet.) The integration that Spike Source did is not a very good one. Maybe they did as much as they could, given what the products can do. I am not sure. All products have kept their original look and feel and there are several UI’s for the different products that users will need to deal with.

2. SuiteTwo is not scalable! At least not compared to Blogtronix or any other major social media platform I know. It appears that on a single Intel server box SuiteTwo can support no more that 1,000 users. On the same configuration, even today Blogtronix can support hundreds of thousand of blogs, wikis, RSS, documents, and Social networking users. I think that in Bulgaria we are running some 70,000 users social networking site on an AMD chip with 2Gigs of Ram that is more than two years old server box. I guest Intel wants to sell you lots of Intel boxes here. In our US data centers our Dell 2950’s with dual core Intel run hundreds or groups with thousands or users. The problem for SuiteTwo is that they need to run a lot more software on the same box. They have MS Windows, MS SQL, VMWare and all 5 (five) software apps on top of this. Each software is written in different language; .NET, Pirl, PHP, Java…..I not sure about it all.

3. SuiteTwo is very, very Expensive! The starter kit, which includes the above-mentioned appliance costs $9,999 USD for 10 (TEN), YES, TEN (as 10, X, Deset, Dix, Tien, Dieci, Diez…) users. And what do you think a license for 500 users would cost you? How about $81,295.99. This is not in Canadian dollars! This is a license only price for SuiteTwo from the web (INTEL SUITETWO BLOG RSS WIKI-500U BL, MFG#: SUT010MSGE0500) I am mot sure, but I don’t think this includes the hardware applaince, installations, customization, upgrades, and support. I may be wrong. If you want Social Networking, you need to pay more. I am not sure how much, but you can do the math.

4. SuiteTwo is not very useful. One thing that I noticed during my demo is that content and tools were still working in silos and were not very well connected. What do I mean by that? There were groups in the SocialText wiki, (the wiki SuiteTwo uses) but these groups had nothing to do with the groups (if they were groups ) in the Blog section. The tools were not integrated very well. The only thing that was cool were the tag cloud, which again w/o the integrated groups is not very productive.

5. IT Department will hate to deal with SuiteTwo software! At least I will hate to be the IT person in charge of updating this appliance or software, doing regular maintenance, and backups. After spending more than a decade from a network admin on the Stock Exchange, a CIO for a media company, or a VP of Technology at ABN AMRO Bank, I know a bit about enterprise IT. I am not sure how many of my IT peers will agree with me, but I would hate to buy an appliance that is made of too many parts and run my day-to-day operations on it. SuiteTwo has five or six (if you count the social networking) applications by itself that are running there. These 5-6 apps are also from different companies that may or may not survive over the next year. They are a single feature companies waiting to be bought or die. What assurance do you get that someone will be here to support you? I know you may ask yourself the same thing about Blogtronix, good. Blogtronix is now more than two years old, but we are a spin off from a larger, TEN-year old company with thousands of clients all around the WORLD today.

6. Well, I want to stop here. There is so much more that is not working for the Intel SuiteTwo, but I don’t have the time to write about all of this like the lack of secure RSS, secure groups, statistics, customizations, document management, video blogging and podcasting, user administration and so on.


You need to make up your own mind about what you need and what you want to buy, use and support for your organization. We are here to show you why Blogtronix is not only superior to SuiteTwo, but also more useful and a better product all together. I know, Intel is behind them with big marketing cash and they have a bigger booth at the shows, but that does not mean that their technology is better. I remember the time when Google had a small booth in the back at Comdex and no one was stopping at their booth, well, not any more ;)

If you have any question on how Blogtronix works and how we are better, just call or email us. We are here for you. And you will not get “Intel” sales people with Spike emails to contact you.

Best,
Vassil Mladjov

Technorati tags: blogtronix , suitetwo , intel , socialtext , spike

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