Google Wave was ahead of it’s time. We wrote about Wave and your business in October of 2009. Although Wave held a lot of promise, we had problems finding the right ways to use the capabilities of Wave.

But all is not lost on Google’s experiment with Wave. Many of Wave’s technologies, such as real time collaboration, have already made it into other Google products.

Kudos to Google for being ambitious. The fact they pulled Wave so quickly was a bit surprising but I’m sure they’ll put the lessons from Wave to good use.

The best article we’ve read regarding Wave and it’s potential was written by Jason Kolb on his blog. 

If the technical jargon in Jason’s post throws you off at least read this excerpt from the link above:

Take CRM and ERP systems for example. Instead of customers emailing you about a sale and then sending purchase orders, it will be part of the “sale wave”. The entire sale, from start to finish, will be encapsulated in a single wave, bringing individuals in and out of the conversation as need. The ERP and CRM platforms themselves will be participants in this conversation, recognizing the purchase order, executing the workflow, processing the order, making the order details available to manufacturing or delivery in a sub-wave, and then making the receipt available to the customer and the sales team. Your CRM Whether you approve the purchase order from your desktop, your phone, or a point of sale device, makes no difference–they can all be directly addressed and participate in the conversation natively.

Jason is talking about Wave transforming your disparate business processes into a single unified conversation. Not only that, the participants in the conversation are not only people, but actual applications performing actions automatically as necessary!

As you can imagine, this would fundamentally change how business is done. We believe this is still a few years away, but the technology is coming. Be ready!

UPDATED: Sorry, all the invites are gone! Better luck next time.

Wave is a fundamental change in business communications and we believe Wave, or something very similar, will replace email…eventually. However, we feel that Wave is 1-2 years away from becoming usable in a business environment. We have access to the beta version of Google Wave and it is definitely not ready for primetime.

We will continue to watch the developments regarding Google Wave closely. As the technology matures and the platform stabilizes we will be integrating Wave into our recommended products for our clients.

In the meantime, if you’d like to see how some visionaries plan to use Wave, read this Lifehacker article. Wave promises to enable these types of real time collaboration, but it’s just too early to put it into practical use.