Microsoft — the Facebook of the enterprise?

Microsoft will provide the nation’s fourth largest bank, Wachovia, with a social-networking platform for its 100,000 plus employees over the next few months, CIO Insight is reporting.

It will provide the bank with a user-friendly “knowledge-managment” platform akin to the popular Facebook, integrated with Wachovia’s business applications.

This is significant because it steals the limelight from a gaggle other contenders trying to serve corporations with social networks. There’s also a notable comment from Wachovia’s director of eBusiness for employees, Pete Fields, that he finds Facebook’s lack of an enterprise initiative “puzzling,” and suggesting that he turned to Microsoft as a result.

This also raises questions about the Microsoft-Facebook partnership that exists on the advertising front. Microsoft has signed a big deal to run ads on Facebook, and the two sides say publicly they are happy and working together. Could this Wachovia deal lead to friction, or have the two companies decided to divide and conquer?

From the CIO report:

The vendor for the big project isn’t one of the many contenders such as Visible Path, SelectMinds and Leverage Software in the burgeoning enterprise social-net market, or the ballyhooed Facebook itself. It’s Microsoft, which offers easy interconnection with other applications via its Office SharePoint Server product. Integration into the daily routine of business was a difference-maker in choosing the software. “Microsoft has a relatively rich technology offering, with natural integration across different product sets,” says Pete Fields, Wachovia’s director of eBusiness for employees. “Desktop and productivity tools are still so Microsoft-centric that it made sense.”

Fields also makes the remark that an advanced system like this is attractive to younger employees, and so helps retain them in a competitive labor market — and underscores how we’re likely to see more of these deals going forward.

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