I was contacted last week by representatives of a new entrant to what is generally called enterprise social networking, Leverage Software, Today, the company is announcing its new product suite, Relationship Intelligence, and its positioning of the company and product around the concept of "Relationship Capital Management."

[from press release] Leverage Software Enters into Relationship Capital Management

As a New Market Segment, Relationship Capital Management Enables Sales Organizations to Gain Insight, Access and Influence of Trusted Relationships to Accelerate Sales Cycles

October 4, 2004 – San Francisco, California – Leverage Software, a leading provider of Relationship Capital Management™, today announced its entry into the business applications market of social networking. Relationship Capital Management (RCM) is recognized by many of today’s leading industry analysts and industry pundits as technology that will profoundly impact the sales processes across both emerging and Global 2000 companies. Leverage Software’s RCM solutions are quickly becoming a strategic ally for leading sales organizations; empowering them to discover, analyze and leverage their collective enterprise relationships to gain access and influence to decision makers through a trusted introduction.

• Leverage is a partner of SalesForce.com (like Visible Path, Spoke, and perhaps other competitors).

  Integration with SFA and CRM apps is the clear trajectory in this niche, and in a real sense, the final analysis for utility will be the degree to which these solutions meld with the business processes that SFA and CRM apps automate. To the best meld will go the spoils.
  

• Leverage is going head-to-head with the more well-established Visible Path. Their target market and their pitch is very similar. In particular, Visible Path has been pushing the "Relationship Capital" message very effectively, supported by their very assiduous attention to privacy and security.
  
• I sense a coming price war in the wind, where Leverage seems open to aggressive pricing with the intent of gaining market traction. Depending on your viewpoint of possible endgames for this sector, gaining heads and growth may translate into an attractive acquisition proposition for SFA/CRM vendors who may (in the not too distant future) may be casting about for acquisition candidates. This consolidation is to me inevitable, once the value proposition for these technologies is clearly proven by uptake and ROI.

The appearance of Leverage makes me wonder how many more of these competitors are going to pop out of the woodwork, and are there any serious first mover advantages? The barriers to entry are low, but the cost of implementing the underlying analyses that Visible Path and more well-established players have invested years of effort and millions into may be problematic, but it is clear at the same time that these are early days, and it is not always the first, or even best engineered products, that win in the long run.

Its a horse race, and its way too early to call.