Analyst(s): Nikos Drakos, Jeffrey Mann, Adam Sarner
VIEW SUMMARY
As interest in social software increases, market consolidation is beginning in earnest
and buyers' attention is focusing on fewer vendors. Market volatility will remain
high as vendors jostle for position, so buyers will need to remain cautious.
Market Definition/Description
This Magic Quadrant covers vendors whose software products are used mainly within
enterprises, primarily by employees but also by external customers, suppliers and
partners, to support work teams, communities and social networking.
Buyers in this market are looking for persistent virtual environments in which participants
can create, organize and share information, as well as find, connect and interact
with each other.
Business use of these products varies in its degree of formality and openness — from
information sharing and project coordination within a small, homogeneous group, to
the sharing of best practices within a business unit, to the encouragement of networking
and information exchange between employees across a whole organization or with external
participants in other organizations.
In general terms, products that compete in this market help users to:
- Find out about each other personally or professionally
- Mine their networks of contacts and acquaintances for advice, references and referrals
- Form teams, communities or informal groups, and invite external participants from
other organizations
- Work together on the same work objects
- Discuss and comment on their work
- Organize work from their perspective
- Identify relevant work
- Discover other people with common interests
- Alert users to information or events that might be relevant to them
- Learn from others' expertise
Specific uses of products in this market include:
- Sharing team information and coordinating project-related activities by adding permanence
and structure to ad hoc communications.
- Empowering communities of experts and interested parties — bonding people by specific
interests, capturing best practices, disseminating lead-user innovation and providing
an informal support network.
- Facilitating social interaction by helping people establish and strengthen personal
relationships, develop trust, and ultimately reduce friction and accelerate the business
processes in which people engage.
- Accessing relevant knowledge and expertise that can be used to formulate a plan of
action when decisions need to be made.
Gartner covers the market for social CRM in a separate Magic Quadrant as those products
support very different use cases, and are bought by buyers in different roles. Although
there is some overlap between the vendors in these Magic Quadrants, their products
invariably have functionality specific to the different use cases.
We have extended slightly the scope of this
Magic Quadrant to include external use
cases, and will no longer publish a separate
Magic Quadrant for externally facing
social software. Although some products still
focus on internal or external use cases,
this differentiation is no longer sufficient
to warrant a separate Magic Quadrant.
The impact of this change on the number of
vendors included in the present Magic Quadrant
is minimal — only one vendor (Huddle) that
appeared in 2011's "Magic Quadrant for Externally Facing Social
Software" appears in this Magic Quadrant because of the change in scope.
For more details,
see "Changes to the Social Software Magic
Quadrants."
This Magic Quadrant covers a broad set of products, vendors and use cases. One subsegment
that is attracting growing attention — to judge from inquiries from Gartner clients
and interest from prospective buyers — comprises products bought specifically for
enterprise social networking by organizations less interested in using them as platforms
for managing content or delivering other services. We shall take a closer look at
this subsegment — which includes products such as salesforce.com's Chatter, Microsoft's
Yammer, Tibco Software's tibbr and VMware's Socialcast — in a separate "Critical Capabilities
for Enterprise Social Networking" report, to be published later in 2012.
Magic Quadrant
Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace
Note: blueKiwi was acquired by Atos in April 2012, and Yammer was acquired by Microsoft
in June 2012. The acquired vendors appear under their original names, and in Yammer's
case separately from its acquirer, as no major changes to their businesses are likely
in the short term.
Source: Gartner (September 2012)
Vendor Strengths and Cautions
Acquia
Acquia is in the Visionaries quadrant. It provides commercial support and enterprise
services relating to the open-source Drupal distribution. Acquia sells products and
services to support and host internal and external-facing Drupal websites.
Strengths
- Ecosystem: Drupal is proven in large, high-profile deployments. It has an active developer community
with 600,000 members, a track record of community support and a growing ecosystem
of service providers. Open-source communities are typically larger and more active
in development work than those of proprietary vendors. The Drupal community has contributed
over 10,000 modules.
- Viability: Acquia is an organization funded by venture capital that offers a commercially supported
version of Drupal and is led by Drupal's founder, which puts it very close to the
open-source project's activities. Acquia partners with about 500 consulting and development
organizations to provide a range of services, including community strategy, Web strategy,
design, implementation, development and performance-tuning services.
- Platform: Drupal is a rich and extensible platform for social publishing that provides much
more control over content layout and editorial workflow than typical enterprise social
networking products.
Cautions
- Complexity: Drupal's richness and flexibility can be a source of unneeded complexity for those
looking for a quick "off the shelf" implementation. Reference customers cited concerns
with the quality of documentation and the effort required to improve sluggish performance.
- Features: Acquia is only now adding native support for mobile devices, such as the Apple iPhone
and iPad, and for Research In Motion BlackBerry and Google Android apps.
- Support: Acquia is growing in terms of number of employees, revenue and its ecosystem of partners,
but it remains smaller than most of the vendors in this Magic Quadrant.
Atlassian
Atlassian is in the Challengers quadrant. Atlassian Confluence is known as a wiki-centric
collaboration product, but it is being transformed into a social platform for the
creation and sharing of content by employee teams, project teams and communities.
Strengths
- Viability: Atlassian has approximately 350 staff worldwide, growing revenue and a very large
customer base, including many customers with large deployments.
- Functionality: Confluence has some of the richest browser-based content creation functionality,
which, coupled with improved sharing, activity streams, notifications, mobility and
other improvements, make it a strong collaboration product, particularly for documentation
and product development support roles.
- Customer experience: Buyers choose Confluence, one of the most cost-effective products, for both its low
cost and its capabilities — their appreciative comments include "the cost-benefit
of Confluence is outstanding" and "exceeded expectations."
Cautions
- Vision: Confluence is not the main product in Atlassian's portfolio — its biggest seller
is Jira, an issue-tracking system. Although Confluence is evolving fast enough to
keep up, it is not leading the sector. The recently introduced cloud Confluence OnDemand
offering has not yet achieved critical mass, and important functions such as mobility
features have only just been added.
- Focus: Atlassian's products are typically bought by IT departments, and tend to do best
in deployments that involve technical users.
- Strategy: Atlassian has historically relied on a "low touch" marketing and sales model, which
some large organizations may find unsuited to their needs. Atlassian is enhancing
its operations to address this issue, but this will take time.
blueKiwi
blueKiwi is in the Niche Players quadrant. Its was one of the first products to base
the user experience on activity streams. In 2012, blueKiwi was acquired by Atos, Europe's
second-largest IT services provider.
Strengths
- Platform: blueKiwi offers comprehensive functionality, with strong support for participation,
social networking analytics, microblogging, rich media (including video), extensive
community management, polling and ideation. It combines these in a single platform
that can simultaneously support internal networking, external communities and social
media engagement.
- User experience: blueKiwi places strong emphasis on ease of use and an engaging user experience. As
one reference customer said, its product is "easy to deploy and use."
- Viability: The acquisition by Atos could help blueKiwi become visible to more organizations
and give it a credible cloud strategy with a strong multiregion presence (via Atos's
Canopy offering). Already, as part of Atos, blueKiwi's sales and its service capabilities
have strengthened, and its pace of development has accelerated.
Cautions
- Viability: Despite being one of the first vendors to offer a product in the enterprise social
software market, blueKiwi has limited market presence. Also, Atos's commitment, and
its ability as a consulting company, to succeed with blueKiwi's product in a highly
competitive market have yet to be tested.
- Innovation: Although blueKiwi's product has some much-liked capabilities (such as easy external
participation) and is the subject of plans for more advanced ones (such as a recommendation
engine), its evolution is following, rather than leading, that of the overall sector.
Cisco
Cisco is in the Visionaries quadrant. Cisco WebEx Social is a modular platform for
social collaboration with a strong emphasis on mobility, video and unified communications
(UC) support.
Strengths
- Viability: Cisco has made significant investments in WebEx Social. This product's recent name
change (from Cisco Quad) and alignment with the well-known WebEx brand and product
family signal further commitment to this market. However, Cisco expects its products
to lead their respective markets, so WebEx Social needs to improve its market position.
- Vision: Cisco sees social software as part of a broader UC user experience and platform that
integrates seamlessly with mobile devices, real-time communications, and the capture
and sharing of rich media, including high-definition video.
- Platform flexibility: WebEx Social can be deployed on a large scale, from the cloud, on-premises and through
virtualized hardware. It combines a broad set of capabilities, including rich profiles,
social graphs, activity streams, communities, social metadata and a "unified post
mechanism" (for conversations, blogs and wikis), all on top of a common policy and
permissions model, a common content store, and a "pluggable" framework that integrates
with content management, instant messaging, voice, conferencing and video services
from Cisco or other vendors.
Cautions
- Ecosystem: Although WebEx Social benefits from Cisco's global network of resellers and service
partners, many are not wholly familiar with this type of product or the change management
issues that need to be addressed to ensure successful implementation. Also, the ecosystem
— comprising, for example, third-party developers — for the evolution of the product
remains nascent.
- Customer experience: WebEx Social is a relatively young product and experiencing "growing pains." One
reference customer commented that although Cisco helped with deployment, it required
some effort to smooth out certain performance issues.
Huddle
Huddle is in the Niche Players quadrant. Huddle offers a software-as-a-service (SaaS)
product for structured document-centric collaboration. It targets collaboration between
organizations, as well as internal collaboration.
Strengths
- Innovation: Huddle is evolving fast, with monthly releases and new functions. These include "intelligent"
file synchronization that automatically replicates the most relevant files (based
on usage frequency and other learned properties) between desktops, mobile devices
and shared workspaces, and PDF annotation on mobile devices.
- Focus: Rather than try to do everything, Huddle focuses on the important use case of collaboration
and team support involving participants from external organizations, with an emphasis
on mobility and file sharing.
- Ecosystem: Huddle works with a variety of, typically cloud-based, technology partners to add
functionality to its products (such as support for editing Microsoft Office documents
on mobile devices using Quickoffice).
Cautions
- Functionality: Despite having a full set of features for team file sharing, Huddle lacks many advanced
social features, such as filtered activity streams and social analytics.
- Strategy: Despite its success in penetrating many organizations, Huddle still merely complements
existing collaboration and social networking solutions, rather than displacing them.
IBM
IBM is in the Leaders quadrant. IBM Connections was one of the first products to target
the social software market specifically. Other products in IBM's portfolio — such
as Sametime, Notes/Domino, FileNet Content Manager and WebSphere Portal Server — broaden
the applicability of Connections.
Strengths
- Ecosystem and viability: IBM has extensive resources and well-developed channels, and it continues to expand
its ecosystem of system integrators and third-party suppliers to support its offerings.
IBM also plays leading roles in the industry bodies developing standards such as OpenSocial
and ActivityStrea.ms.
- Vision: IBM identifies social business as an important part of its strategic future. It has
developed a program combining its expertise in services, consulting and technology
implementation to help clients and prospects in different industries develop social
business strategies and adopt social technologies.
- Customer experience: Connections is increasingly used in more demanding situations by large organizations.
Several reference customers with over 10,000 users commented on the product's straightforward
implementation — their praise included "cannot do without it" and "phenomenal" (though
one balked at a proposal to use Connections as a replacement for Microsoft SharePoint).
IBM was also able to help with customization, but reportedly with "high service costs."
Cautions
- Pace of innovation: IBM is keeping up with the functionality race (with, for example, improved social
analytics, mobility, activity streams, open social support, file sharing and user
experience improvements), and it makes interim releases, extensions, plug-ins and
mobile application updates available throughout the year. However, it releases major
updates only annually, which might put it at a disadvantage to nimbler competitors
with continuous test/release cycles, and might frustrate users who now expect much
more. One factor that makes it hard for IBM to move faster is that, despite its investments
in cloud delivery (SmartCloud), only a small fraction of its core user base is ready
to accept this mode of delivery.
- Complexity: Although Connections is an off-the-shelf product that requires no other products
in order to be used, IBM often needs to introduce other products to address more diverse
requirements. This results in complex deployments that demand extensive installation
and customization work.
Igloo
Igloo is in the Niche Players quadrant. It offers a SaaS solution that bridges internal
and external collaboration and networking.
Strengths
- Functionality: Igloo is a pure SaaS vendor that issues regular quarterly releases. Recent enhancements
include multi-operating-system desktop support with Web Distributed Authoring and
Versioning (WebDAV); HTML5 support for multiple devices; improved analytics through
a partnership with MicroStrategy; support for multiple languages and localization;
and the concept of "channels" for organizing and publishing content around specific
themes.
- Viability: Igloo has made progress during the past 12 months and expanded its operations beyond
North America, but it remains a small vendor with only about 60 employees.
Cautions
- Visibility: Although Igloo has large corporate customers, it must continue to improve its visibility
and reputation as an enterprise vendor, especially with senior executives.
- Platform: For customers wanting to go beyond the solution's built-in functionality, there is
some pre-integration available with Web conferencing products and business applications,
such as those of salesforce.com. However, packaged integration with other platforms
(such as Microsoft SharePoint) and applications is generally limited. General standards-based
integration possibilities include widgets, programming APIs and HTML embedding.
- Customer experience: Although reference customers were generally positive (their appreciative remarks
included "excellent product"), some reported that some IT help was needed for deep
customization.
Jive
Jive is in the Leaders quadrant. It continues to gain enterprise-scale customers thanks
to its broad product capabilities and substantial visibility.
Strengths
- Viability: Jive's initial public offering (IPO) in 2011 made it the first of the major social
software startups to go public. According to Jive's financial results as of August
2012, the company continues to grow strongly. Gartner believes that Jive is the largest
vendor that specializes in workplace social software, and the third-largest vendor
overall in terms of revenue in the adjacent social CRM market. Jive is using its increased
financial strength to boost its operations, product development and cloud strategy,
which includes setting up regional data centers.
- Ecosystem: Jive's partnership program is more developed than those of most competitors. Jive
has big consulting and agency names on board — Accenture, Capgemini, Cognizant, PwC
and SapientNitro — that are building practices dedicated to Jive.
- Vision: Jive's vision for social software is broad and strong. It includes embracing major
new use cases as they emerge within its customer base. Jive says it is making a "big"
shift toward packaged solutions, as opposed to being a platform. In 1Q12, it launched
Social Intranet, Customer Service and Social Marketing & Sales solutions, and it will
build more specific solutions over time in the same areas. Jive has also released
Jive Anywhere, which gives users the ability to pull information contextually from
other applications and Web pages into the Jive network. Jive Anywhere can also monitor
Web activity to offer relevant information proactively within the Jive interface.
Cautions
- Focus: Jive's early success with large deployments for enterprise customers exposes it to
the risk of falling foul of the "innovation dilemma," whereby a vendor places so much
emphasis on the current needs of its largest customers that it falls behind in terms
of innovation and consideration of their future needs. Having navigated the transition
to publicly quoted company, Jive needs to maintain its focus on sustainable differentiation.
- Integration: Reference customers mentioned a need for improved integration with CRM and content
management systems, as well as improved internationalization capabilities.
- Social analytics: Jive's use of its investments in Proximal Labs to develop adaptive intelligence is
a potential differentiator, but, apart from incremental enhancements to several modules,
this functionality will not be available until 2013.
Liferay
Liferay is in the Niche Players quadrant. It offers a portal-centric platform for
organizations looking to develop and integrate social interaction and community support
in a flexible environment.
Strengths
- Integration: Liferay's Social Office collaboration and social interaction capabilities are available
in a no-cost Community Edition from the Liferay Marketplace. In addition, a licensed
and supported Enterprise Edition of Liferay Social Office will be sold from the Marketplace
in 3Q12. Both editions install into a Liferay Portal and include built-in content
management (with hooks to alternative systems), as well as Microsoft Office integration.
- Ecosystem: Liferay has a healthy developer and partner ecosystem, with thousands of developers
and an active marketplace.
- Strategy: Liferay is one of the few remaining specialist vendors in the portal space, and is
seeking to extend its position into collaboration and networking. Its broad platform
capabilities and open-source, low-cost, support-based model are attractive to many
buyers.
Cautions
- Focus: Although there is some evidence that Liferay Portal is being used to provide collaboration
and social networking in the context of large portal deployments, Liferay is still
relatively unknown in this market.
- Customer experience: Liferay's portal platform capabilities add flexibility and power when customization
is needed, but can take longer to deploy than others. One typical reference customer
commented that his organization chose Liferay for its "breadth of capabilities," but
Liferay has less experience of supporting social initiatives than other vendors in
this Magic Quadrant.
- Innovation: Despite an active open-source development community and several enhancements (such
as a separate module for desktop and mobile file synchronization [Liferay Sync], personal
sites and a simple installer for Social Office), Liferay is generally following, rather
than leading, in terms of collaboration and social capabilities. Its pace of innovation
is also hampered by the reluctance of many Liferay customers to accept cloud deployment
options (90% use Liferay on-premises).
Microsoft
Microsoft is in the Leaders quadrant because of its very robust ecosystem and the
broad market penetration of SharePoint Server. (Note that Yammer, which Microsoft
acquired in June 2012, is assessed separately in this Magic Quadrant.)
Strengths
- Integration: Microsoft Windows, Office, Exchange, Lync and SharePoint all work best with each
other, offering IT organizations at least the appearance of simplicity in terms of
training, usability, extensibility and management. Customers typically buy SharePoint
for its breadth of capabilities as a platform and alignment with other Microsoft products,
and because of their overall business relationship with Microsoft through, for example,
Enterprise Agreements.
- Functionality: Given all the tools, components and services available from Microsoft's SharePoint
ecosystem, and all the features available in the base product (such as content management,
search, portal, document-centric programming, traditional team collaboration and social
software), SharePoint has arguably the broadest range of capabilities of any offering
on the market.
- Viability: Judging by comments from Gartner clients, we believe that more enterprises are considering
using SharePoint (or the SharePoint Online component of Office 365) to meet their
collaboration and social software needs than any other platform.
Cautions
- User experience: SharePoint's "out of the box" user experience has not kept up with market expectations.
Some reference customers mentioned a need for customization, as well as usability
issues with group/community creation, and with the rigidity of the discussion functionality.
One reference customer commented tellingly: "It's not perfect, it's not horrible,
but it must overcome its legacy."
- Functionality: The long lead-time between releases means that it is only in its next version that
SharePoint will be able to deliver common capabilities such as activity streams, reasonable
mobile support and an acceptable user experience. Gartner expects it to be on general
release by early 2013.
- Pace of innovation: Despite the availability of Office 365 and SharePoint Online, the overwhelming majority
of large Microsoft customers still depend on on-premises deployments, with many of
them still using 2007 versions. The acquisition of Yammer might help Microsoft innovate
more quickly, but it will need to perform a complex balancing act to satisfy the requirements
of a conservative customer base and demanding end users, while managing two related,
but radically different and slightly overlapping, products. (See also the separate
assessment of Yammer in this document.)
Moxie Software
Moxie is in the Niche Players quadrant. Its Collaboration Spaces is a relatively new
product for employee collaboration and networking, as well as collaboration with partners
and customers.
Strengths
- Functionality: Moxie offers broad support for document collaboration, media galleries and video,
including transcoding and streaming, "idea storms" and idea leaderboards, optimized
mobile browser displays and native applications for iOS devices, rich profiles, activity
feeds, recommendations, people search, file storage and synchronization, as well as
a bundled Autonomy search engine. An integrated knowledgebase enables crowdsourced
content to be verified before internal or external publishing.
- Strategy: Moxie offers all-inclusive packaging with straightforward pricing and an emphasis
on initial use-case consulting, as well as follow-on services and access to Moxie
Insight (a research group offering thought leadership) to help ensure adoption and
business impact.
- Architecture: Moxie emphasizes the seamlessness of the user experience when navigating internal
collaboration spaces and external-facing customer communication spaces, which Moxie
also supports with a related product. This is particularly important for activities
that span both domains (such as customer service/support and product development).
Cautions
- Ecosystem: Moxie has introduced an integration platform called Spaces Connect and continues
to build relationships with channel and service partners, but it could do more to
attract independent developers and provide a marketplace for extensions and plug-ins.
- Focus: Moxie's main focus is its multichannel customer engagement offerings. Collaboration
Spaces is a complementary product that fits in naturally with Mozie's core offerings,
but the company needs to enhance its presence and increase its appeal as a general-purpose
social software vendor beyond its "natural" primary buyers.
- Customer experience: So far, there have not been many large-scale deployments of Collaboration Spaces,
so the ability of system and organization to operate effectively at a large scale
in this market is unconfirmed.
Novell
Novell is in the Niche Players quadrant. Its Vibe suite is usually deployed for project
and team collaboration, networking, and knowledge management for internal and external
teams.
Strengths
- Functionality: Vibe is a capable suite that combines strong traditional collaboration capabilities,
including support for documents, process workflow and e-forms, as well as rich social
networking functionality. Recent enhancements include offline support with file synchronization
(Vibe Desktop) and Microsoft Office integration.
- Integration: Vibe offers pre-integration with Novell's email, presence and instant messaging systems,
as well as with those from other vendors and custom applications. Vibe is also bundled
with the Novell Open Workgroup Suite, which includes the GroupWise email and calendaring
product.
- Customer experience: Reference customers praised Vibe's ease of installation and use, adding that end
users found the file sharing and project collaboration support particularly useful.
Cautions
- Strategy: Novell has
embarked on a major attempt to add value for, and thereby stabilize, its
GroupWise customers, after dropping
initiatives to enter new product areas last year.
Vibe plays an important role in
demonstrating Novell's continued commitment to the
broader communication and collaboration
space. At the same time, Vibe's future depends
largely on Novell's ability to succeed
with this strategy (see also "MarketScope for Email Systems").
- Viability: Novell needs to work quickly to revitalize Vibe and improve its visibility beyond
its customer base and IT buyers.
- Ecosystem: Despite fostering developer communities through an open-source edition for some time,
contributions to this product have been limited in terms of plug-ins, extensions and
enhancements.
OpenText
OpenText is in the Niche Players quadrant. It offers OpenText Social Communities,
which supports internal associates and external customers.
Strengths
- Viability: OpenText is financially stable and has a large installed base of customers on which
it can build to expand its presence in the social software market.
- Integration: OpenText Social Communities benefits from integration with OpenText's Content Server,
which provides records management and content library services. Also, a major integration
program has helped rationalize overlapping product lines in a product portfolio built
up over the years through acquisitions.
- Scalability: OpenText has customers in industries such as government and the utility sector that
support large user populations. It has a tiered licensing model based on the number
of CPUs, which encourages deployments to large user bases.
Cautions
- Focus: Although OpenText recently invested in platform rationalization for several social
software offerings, it must do more to build its presence and credibility in this
market.
- Vision: Although sold as stand-alone software, OpenText's social software offering may be
best suited to customers with an existing investment in OpenText, or for those considering
social software as part of an overall information management strategy.
- Pace of innovation: Although OpenText continues to make necessary investments in mobility, core functionality
and cloud delivery (such as with its acquisition of EasyLink, a cloud-based service
provider), there is little to differentiate it from its competitors in this market,
beyond the additional value derived from the rest of its product portfolio. Given
that its customers primarily have on-premises deployments, OpenText might struggle
to keep up with nimbler competitors.
Saba
Saba is in the Niche Players quadrant. Its offerings combine collaboration, Web conferencing,
social learning and performance management capabilities in a unified solution called
Saba Social Enterprise.
Strengths
- Viability: Saba is an established public company with over 850 employees, a strong partner program
and a worldwide presence, along with strong global cloud service capabilities.
- Innovation: Saba offers native mobile clients and YouTube-like rich-media content management
that includes video, Web conference recordings and a "dynamic people profile" that
combines social tagging with a "Klout-like" influence and reputation score, along
with formal accreditations to identify experts. A new "freemium" service (Saba People
Cloud) offered by a new business unit aims to accelerate innovation and user adoption.
Saba also offers a fully unified solution for social talent management that combines
social rewards and recognition features with formal people and team management processes.
In addition, Saba incorporates into its social solution learning functionality that
adds social learning, as well as the ability to assign and take formal courses (based
on standards-compliant learning content from any content provider).
- Strategy: This vendor is combining Saba Meeting for real-time online collaboration and conferencing
with asynchronous collaboration and business networking in a unified collaboration
offering. Saba also combines what it calls "strategic people process solutions" —
in other words, learning and people management — with social collaboration in a unified
platform. In addition, Saba can exploit its presence in adjacent learning, performance
management and Web conferencing markets.
Cautions
- Focus: Saba is a leader in the corporate learning system and talent management market. Its
social collaboration support in the field of talent management and learning is strong,
but it must do more to establish itself as a major player for general-purpose collaboration
and social interaction in other contexts.
- Functionality: Although Saba has broad functionality — particularly taking into account its related
real-time conferencing, social learning and social talent management products — there
are some functional shortcomings. These include limited capabilities for document
authoring, file synchronization and browser previewing of shared documents.
salesforce.com
salesforce.com is in the Leaders quadrant. Chatter, its social networking tool, is
used for employee networking, information sharing (especially for sales and customer
support activities), executive communications, and capturing and discussing ideas.
Strengths
- Vision: saleforce.com has a strong vision for social software. Its broad "social enterprise" vision covers
areas like CRM and human capital management, in addition to collaboration within the
workforce.
- Integration: Chatter can be used independently, but its value increases when used in combination
with salesforce.com's other business applications. Business events such as contract
updates and customer interactions then appear in activity streams to be discussed
or "followed," while conversations, responses and ideas become easily accessible from
within relevant business records.
- Pace of innovation: Chatter supports a broad range of internal and CRM-related use cases, although not
in equal depth. Chatter's development focuses on adding depth and filling gaps in
areas such as idea management, brand and reputation monitoring, social campaigns and
social sales collaboration.
Cautions
- Architecture: salesforce.com's broad vision is backed by fast-paced development and a string of
social- and workforce-technology-related acquisitions (such as GroupSwim, Heroku,
Dimdim, Manymoon, Radian6, Rypple, Stypi, Buddy Media and GoInstant). Although positive
overall, this approach could introduce overlaps and complexity for both salesforce.com
and its customers, if not handled properly.
- Focus: Although salesforce.com has always supported collaboration in the context of CRM
processes, it is a relatively recent entrant to the general collaboration space and
is investing heavily to extend its core product, as well as in marketing to increase
its market presence. But despite signs of success as a networking tool, Chatter is
still not perceived as a general-purpose collaboration tool to support structured
tasks, ongoing projects and formal communities. Most of the Chatter projects Gartner
encounters build on existing salesforce.com deployments, rather than starting afresh
as independent social software choices.
- Functionality: Chatter
is still evolving and has recently benefited from integration with
real-time
capabilities such as chat, screen sharing
and audio/video sharing (Chatter Messenger,
via the acquisition of Dimdim); stream
filtering and recommendations; Microsoft SharePoint
integration (Chatter for SharePoint); and
an active marketplace for Chatter apps (ChatterExchange).
However, gaps remain in areas such as
end-user creation tools, document conversion/reviewing
and self-service site publishing.
Socialtext
Socialtext is in the Niche Players quadrant. It has a comprehensive set of collaboration
and social capabilities used for internal collaboration, information sharing and networking.
Following an investment by Bedford Funding (a private equity firm), Socialtext is
closely aligned with, but organizationally independent of, Peoplefluent, a talent
management company also owned by Bedford Funding.
Strengths
- Innovation: Socialtext was one of the first vendors in the social software market, and its product
has a broad range of capabilities. Recent enhancements include more templates, native
mobile clients, and a visual matching, recommendations and exploration engine (Socialtext
360).
- Vision: Socialtext was one of the first vendors to position a product (Socialtext Connect)
as a "social layer" for providing profiles, activity feeds, personalization and general
"social context" to other applications.
- Integration: Socialtext offers pre-integration with Microsoft SharePoint, with salesforce.com,
with a desktop client for rich activity feeds and file integration, with the WordPress
blogging engine, and with the Bugzilla issue-tracking engine, as well as a rich integration
framework to other business applications.
Cautions
- Focus: Socialtext is a small organization with only about 50 employees. Bedford Funding's
recent investment in Socialtext and commitment to keep its product independent are
generally positive developments, but Socialtext has seen high turnover in its executive
ranks during the past year. Furthermore, the planned integration with Peoplefluent's
technology might distract attention from Socialtext's product, and eventually lead
to its being subsumed, especially if it underperforms as an independent offering.
- Ecosystem: Socialtext has a growing number of partners, as well as an active private developer
community (SocialDev). However, Socialtext needs to do more with its partners to keep
up with competitors.
- Customer experience: Although reference customers were generally positive in their feedback and praised
the product's flexibility, they identified a need for easier customization and UI
improvements. Feedback about customer service was also mixed.
SuccessFactors
SuccessFactors, which was acquired by SAP in February 2012, is in the Visionaries
quadrant. SuccessFactors Jam is used for employee communication, project collaboration,
and skill/expertise tracking and reporting as part of overall performance management.
Strengths
- Strategy: SuccessFactors Jam is offered both separately and as part of the SuccessFactors Business
Execution (BizX) Software suite that mainly targets HR buyers. Jam is used for expertise
tracking, recruitment and onboarding, informal learning and employee engagement. The
introduction of a freemium offering aims to accelerate adoption.
- Innovation: SuccessFactors' broad set of capabilities includes innovative features such as the
following: conversion of Microsoft Office documents and PDF files to a format that
can be displayed, edited and discussed in a browser; rich profiles with dozens of
attributes (including badges); activity feeds with private messaging; rich-media/video
content authoring and desktop recording; and decision-making support (with "responsible,
accountable, consulted and informed" [RACI] and strengths, weaknesses, opportunities
and threats [SWOT] models, and radar charts).
Cautions
- Focus: SuccessFactors' Jam and SAP's StreamWork solutions have been brought together under
a newly established social software team within SuccessFactors. One of the challenges
for this team will be to improve the visibility and market traction of these solutions,
not only as part of a broader business suite but also as general-purpose independent
products.
- Road map: SuccessFactors needs to execute carefully with respect to rationalizing SuccessFactors
Jam and SAP StreamWork, two complementary but also overlapping products.
- Customer experience: Reference customers made positive comments about smooth deployment and overall satisfaction,
but one cited difficulties in managing deployments with isolated subnetworks.
Telligent
Telligent is in the Visionaries quadrant. Telligent Community is used for creating
branded customer, partner and prospect communities. Telligent Enterprise is used for
employee communities, as well as for project and team collaboration.
Strengths
- Functionality: Telligent has advanced community capabilities directed at externally facing audiences
and social CRM (Telligent Community 7.0) and workforce implementations (Telligent
Enterprise 4.0). In addition, it has a broad range of capabilities for document sharing,
rich editing and full email integration, as well as seven types of user profile with
reputation scoring. Recent enhancements include richer content management through
an OEM agreement with Sitecore, deeper integration with Microsoft SharePoint, improved
analytics for both historical and near-real-time reporting, and information filtering.
- Flexibility: As well as winning deals on the strength of its partnerships, Telligent wins business
due to its flexibility in hosting and integration. It offers solutions on-premises,
in private clouds and in public clouds on both a single-tenant and a multitenant hosted
basis. It is also flexible about pricing, offering both subscription-based and perpetual
license options.
- Viability: Gartner estimates that Telligent grew its revenue for the second year in a row in
2011, with its total rising by 30% to about $22 million.
Cautions
- Focus: Telligent performs effectively in several use cases, which shows it has functional
breadth, but it has yet to be generally considered the best at any one use case. It
displays the most strength in relation to community support.
- Acquisition target: Although Telligent continues to grow, it is still below the $50 million annual revenue
target that we believe it must reach in order to survive independently. Telligent
continues to prove its strength in the community market, but its reliance on integrations
and its smaller scale, along with the continued consolidation of the social software
market, might increase the chance of it being acquired.
- Analytics: Reference clients have said that Telligent Analytics 3.x can be buggy, which is a problem in
environments where accurate analysis and insights are of paramount importance.
Tibco Software
Tibco is in the Challengers quadrant. Its enterprise social networking product, tibbr,
offers a broad set of capabilities and is used for information distribution, communication
and collaboration.
Strengths
- Platform: tibbr is
available as SaaS or an on-premises product for the same price. In
addition
to its core social networking
functionality, tibbr offers tibCast, a set of UC tools
running in the context of the activity
stream, which include: videoconferencing, audioconferencing,
desktop sharing, voice memos, instant
messaging and presence; "smart widgets" to embed
tibbr components in other applications;
tibbr Geo, an HTML5 mobile app that geo-tags
posts so that they can be accessed later
by users in the same location; a "subject"-based
information organization architecture
popular among information managers; and FlipView,
a magazine-style view of enterprise
content enabled by a tibbr iPad application.
- Integration: tibbr capitalizes on Tibco's strong integration background with "out of the box"
bidirectional connectors for enterprise applications (such as Microsoft SharePoint
and those of Oracle, SAP and salesforce.com), personal social networking sites (such
as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn), and third-party cloud apps (such as Google Docs,
Box and Adobe Connect).
- Viability: tibbr can draw on Tibco's resources, ecosystem, visibility and customers.
Cautions
- Strategy: Although Tibco has joined this market at a time of growing interest in social software,
and has executed reasonably well so far, in the long term it will need to do more
to differentiate tibbr from the offerings of numerous competitors.
- Functionality: Although tibbr offers integration with a variety of third-party platforms, its range
of built-in application functions is limited beyond social networking, particularly
in terms of creating and managing tasks and documents (for example, desktop file synchronization,
file version control and browser-based document authoring).
- Customer experience: Tibbr is a relatively new product and although feedback from reference customers
was generally positive, there was also mention of setup glitches that required patches
and performance troubleshooting.
VMware
VMware enters the Magic Quadrant as a Challenger, following its acquisition of Socialcast,
an enterprise social networking vendor.
Strengths
- Road map: Beyond its core networking capabilities, VMware is enhancing Socialcast's connectivity
and integration options and analytics (with shared customizable dashboards), and plans
to embed project management (Socialcast Strides), richer messaging with inbox management,
and real-time chat/presence services.
- Vision: Socialcast by VMware can be deployed on-premises or as a cloud service for internal
social networking. Socialcast technology is also integrated with VMware Horizon Application
Manager for centralized policy-driven access to cloud applications.
- Viability: Socialcast by VMware draws on the resources and ecosystem of VMware, and benefits
from access to VMware's customer base. A free option for up to 50 users is helping
it gain broader visibility.
Cautions
- Focus: VMware is increasing its commitment to Socialcast and to end-user computing applications
in general at the same time as it is gaining traction in the growing social software
market. However, Socialcast is only a small part of VMware's business, and unless
Socialcast achieves a leading position in this market, it could be sidetracked by
other priorities at VMware.
- Strategy: VMware is respected by technologists in both its user base and its ecosystem, but
must improve its access to business decision makers and to partners that can handle
change management.
Yammer
Yammer, which was acquired by Microsoft in June 2012, is in the Leaders quadrant.
It offers a popular enterprise social networking product for communication, information
distribution and collaboration. (Note that Microsoft's other offerings in this market,
which include SharePoint in particular, are represented separately under Microsoft
in this Magic Quadrant.)
Strengths
- Strategy: Yammer has a strong focus on user-friendly, cloud-based, mobile-first, social networking
capabilities. These were inspired by Facebook, but have been enhanced with enterprise
control features. Yammer's early entry to this market with a successful freemium option
gave it broad visibility, and it continues to grow.
- Vision and road map: Yammer is likely to use the popularity of its core enterprise social networking capabilities
to solidify its use as a "place" for conversations and information sharing. It is
also likely to do more to establish itself as the "social layer" for other applications
within organizations, and to accelerate integration with Microsoft Office, Dynamics
and other Microsoft applications.
- Platform: Yammer follows an agile methodology that helps it innovate quickly by continually
making improvements. These include "live engagement testing" of different feature
options and rapid iterations that account for what has and has not worked in practice.
This approach results in improved usability and higher voluntary adoption rates than
for competing products.
Cautions
- Focus: Although Yammer's new status as part of Microsoft is already adding to the visibility
and credibility of its offering as an enterprise product, there is uncertainty about
Yammer's long-term prospects within Microsoft. The management and product development
styles of Yammer and Microsoft are very different and might clash, while promoting
and supporting two different but somewhat overlapping products could cause confusion.
- Customer experience: Although feedback from reference customers was positive overall (and one organization
went so far as to say that Yammer "has changed the way we communicate"), there was
mention of difficulties in getting approvals from internal risk managers and in organizing
content in predefined categories.
Vendors Added or Dropped
We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants and MarketScopes as
markets change. As a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic
Quadrant or MarketScope may change over time. A vendor's appearance in a Magic Quadrant
or MarketScope one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we have
changed our opinion of that vendor. It may be a reflection of a change in the market
and, therefore, of changed evaluation criteria, or of a change of focus by that vendor.
Added
- Cisco
- Huddle
- Tibco Software
- Yammer
- VMware
Yammer was acquired by Microsoft in June 2012, but has a separate entry in this Magic
Quadrant as no major changes to its business are likely in the short term.
Drupal-Acquia now appears as Acquia.
Dropped
- Cornerstone OnDemand
- Ektron
- EPiServer
- MindTouch
- Mzinga
- XWiki
The main reason why these vendors are not included in the 2012 Magic Quadrant is that
they did not meet the qualitative market relevance requirements for a product packaged,
marketed, sold and used to support teams, communities and networks mainly within an
organization — that is, not packaged, marketed or used mainly for any other purpose.
These vendors generally focus on other related but distinct markets.
Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria
This Magic Quadrant includes only vendors that met all of the following qualitative
criteria.
Qualitative Market Relevance Criteria
To be included, a vendor must offer a product that is packaged, marketed sold, and
used to support teams, communities and networks mainly within an organization — that
is, not packaged, marketed or used mainly for any other purpose.
The relevant product must support the following minimum functionality "out of the
box" — without the need to purchase any other products:
- User profiles.
- Group spaces that can be private, semiprivate or open.
- Content sharing — the ability to upload, store, organize and share documents or other
content.
- Discussions and conversations.
- Blogs that enable end users to publish entries, for display in reverse chronological
order, and that permit others to comment on them.
- Wikis that enable group authoring of collections of pages, with support for "click
to edit," change tracking and internal linking.
Quantitative Market Presence Criteria
- Worldwide, the vendor has at least 50 employees in its organization dedicated to developing,
marketing or supporting the relevant social software product.
- In its latest fiscal year the vendor generated at least $7 million in revenue that
can be attributed exclusively to the relevant product.
- The vendor had at least 10% year-on-year growth in terms of revenue.
- The vendor has among its paying customers at least 10 organizations with active deployments
for at least 5,000 users (that is, excluding freemium and open-source users).
- At least 150,000 named users (or equivalent) among all the paying organizations are
licensed to use the vendor's relevant product and are actively using it (excluding
unsupported freemium and open-source users).
- The vendor has a presence in at least three geographic regions, with some personnel
dedicated to the relevant product.
- The vendor has at least five partner organizations that are authorized to distribute,
resell or support the relevant product.
Evaluation Criteria
Ability to Execute
Product/Service: The overall product/service functionality rating for each vendor was reached by evaluating
specific functionality that is already available and, in particular, the extent to
which the product goes beyond the baseline functionality required for inclusion. Examples
of the functions and features we looked for are social network analysis, browser-based
productivity suites, dynamic activity streams, document repository integration, social
tagging, social bookmarking, social search, general analytics, expertise location,
group formation based on common interests, content/people ratings, people/content
recommendations, offline support and native mobile clients. We also took into account
the product's ability to serve large numbers of users (over 5,000). In addition, we
gave each product a subjective "usability" score.
Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial, Strategy, Organization): Key aspects of this criterion are the vendor's financial health, including funding,
who is investing in and backing its activities, its profitability, the overall size
of its collaboration and social software business (in particular, numbers of dedicated
employees), and the degree to which the vendor is committed to this part of its business.
Sales Execution/Pricing: This criterion concerns the vendor's ability to sell to large organizations, its
price transparency, the straightforwardness of its sales process, the consistency
of its revenue growth during the past 12 to 24 months, and its opportunity to move
existing customers to products with new or additional capabilities.
Market Responsiveness and Track Record: Not rated, as we could not identify sufficiently independent and measurable factors
related to market responsiveness that would make a difference to the vendors' relative
positions.
Marketing Execution: We looked for evidence of mind share, thought leadership and brand recognition, and
for any specific marketing initiatives (white papers, events, microsites and social
media campaigns) that may have helped to promote them. One particularly effective
approach is for senior executives to be active participants in online conversations
via blogs, comments and industry forums. We also took into account the size of each
vendor's marketing organization.
Customer Experience: We collected customer feedback from vendor-supplied references, discussions with
users of Gartner's inquiry service and other customer-facing interactions, such as
those at Gartner conferences. Customers' experiences were rated based on the vendor's
ability to help customers with professional services and ongoing support. We also
looked at the presence of active customer communities for peer support.
Operations: Factors considered included the quality of the vendor's organizational structure
— skills, experiences, programs, systems and other vehicles that enable it to operate
effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis. We also looked at numbers of technology
and service partners and for any training and certification programs.
Table 1. Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria
|
Evaluation Criteria
|
Weighting
|
|
Product/Service
|
High
|
|
Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial, Strategy, Organization)
|
High
|
|
Sales Execution/Pricing
|
Standard
|
|
Market Responsiveness and Track Record
|
No Rating
|
|
Marketing Execution
|
Standard
|
|
Customer Experience
|
High
|
|
Operations
|
High
|
Source: Gartner (September 2012)
Completeness of Vision
Market Understanding: Each vendor needs to demonstrate a strategic understanding of collaboration and social
software opportunities, such as an understanding of the business value of social interaction
support, the complementarity of related capabilities (content, portal and communications
services), an urgency to pre-integrate them, and a tolerance and acknowledgment of
other existing but related technologies from other vendors. We also looked for an
overall vision of the market that focuses on supporting people-centric activities,
rather than a formal, process-centric view of collaboration.
Marketing Strategy: The degree to which each vendor's marketing approach suits (and/or exploits) emerging
trends and the market's overall direction. In particular, we looked at the use cases
promoted in each vendor's marketing messages to specific buyers, online activities,
and any programs for educating and "priming" the market connected with social interaction
support (for example, freemium, "try before you buy," open-source and hosted versions).
We also assessed the quality of each vendor's online presence.
Sales Strategy: We looked at the level of channel activity, and any opportunities for cross-selling
or converting large numbers of early adopters to high-end or broader deployments;
the vendor's visibility to business and IT decision makers; and the availability of
clear pricing information.
Offering (Product) Strategy: We assessed the degree to which each vendor's product road map reflects demand trends
and opportunities to create demand and seeks to fill gaps and remedy weaknesses. We
also looked at the breadth of each vendor's offering in relation to the inclusion
of additional capabilities or pre-integration with other services (such as email,
IM, presence, Web conferencing and Internet Protocol telephony); interoperability
with business applications; and mobile support. In addition, we rated each vendor's
cloud delivery plans, and the availability of a marketplace that encourages partners
and developers to add value to the product.
Business Model: Not rated, as we could not identify sufficiently independent and measurable factors
that relate to each vendor's business model that would make a difference to the vendors'
relative positions.
Vertical/Industry Strategy: Not rated, as we could not identify sufficiently independent and measurable factors
that relate to each vendor's vertical-market strategy that would make a difference
to the vendors' relative positions.
Innovation: The degree to which each vendor invests in R&D for relevant tools, and the extent
to which it demonstrates "creative energy." Examples of innovation are location-based
"check-in" and geotagging; document format "round-tripping," whereby the look and
feel of documents is preserved when converting them to and from conventional formats
and online editing formats; gamification capabilities, such as the ability to earn
and spend virtual currency; the ability to comment inside previewed documents; remote
wiping of offline data stored on mobile devices; automatic file synchronization between
desktop and shared folders; and instant search results.
Geographic Strategy: We examined each vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet
the specific needs of customers in regions other than that in which its corporate
headquarters is located, directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries,
as appropriate for that geography and market. We also rated each vendor's ability
to deliver cloud services via region-specific data centers.
Table 2. Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria
|
Evaluation Criteria
|
Weighting
|
|
Market Understanding
|
High
|
|
Marketing Strategy
|
Standard
|
|
Sales Strategy
|
Standard
|
|
Offering (Product) Strategy
|
Standard
|
|
Business Model
|
No Rating
|
|
Vertical/Industry Strategy
|
No Rating
|
|
Innovation
|
High
|
|
Geographic Strategy
|
Standard
|
Source: Gartner (September 2012)
Quadrant Descriptions
Leaders
Leaders are well-established vendors with widely used social software and collaboration
offerings. They have established their leadership through early recognition of users'
needs, continuous innovation, overall market presence, and success in delivering user-friendly
and solution-focused suites with broad capabilities.
Challengers
Challengers offer solutions that have a strong market presence or that are otherwise
strong, and they have the market position and resources to become Leaders. But these
vendors may not have the functional breadth, marketing strategy or pace of innovation
of Visionaries. Challengers have established presence, credibility and viability,
and once their products move beyond a "good enough" baseline, they are likely to use
their customer base to overtake competitors and enter the Leaders quadrant.
Visionaries
Visionaries demonstrate a strong understanding of current and future market trends,
such as the importance of a flexible and transparent collaboration environment, as
well as the value of mutual reinforcement of tools that encourage user contributions
and tools that encourage bottom-up group and structure formation. Their products and
product road maps display a tendency for innovation, especially in terms of architecture
and lightweight integration, while their marketing and R&D efforts are often boosted
by alignment with marketplaces and developer ecosystems. Visionaries do no exhibit
the scope of delivery of Challengers or Leaders, but have demonstrated strong vision
across a range of capabilities.
Niche Players
Niche Players provide useful, focused technology, understand the market's changing
dynamics, and strive to evolve their products' capabilities. However, they are held
back by a narrow range of functionality, a lack of clarity in their road map about
how and when they will remedy this shortcoming, or by a lack of market traction. Many
of the smaller Niche Players may enjoy considerable success relative to their size,
but they need to exploit every opportunity to improve their positions before their
competitive differentiation erodes. As the social software market matures, pockets
of specialization may solidify. Therefore, a viable alternative strategy for a minority
of the smaller vendors is to focus on niche sectors for specific industries or activities.
Many of these vendors are unlikely to break out of the Niche Players quadrant, even
though their businesses may remain viable in the long term.
Context
During the time Gartner has been monitoring this market new vendors have appeared
hoping to attract buyers with cloud-based, mobile and Facebook-like social networking
functionality, and established vendors have added social capabilities to existing
offerings in an attempt to rejuvenate and add value to them.
The result is a fairly heterogeneous market with different kinds of social software
product and vendor competing for buyers' attention. The types of vendor include:
- Specialist social application vendors
- Established enterprise platform vendors, such as Microsoft and IBM, that are either
incrementally refining social capabilities or acquiring them
- Business application vendors, such as salesforce.com, that are seeking to increase
the value of their products and sell social capabilities mainly to support specific
business activities
Enterprises continue to invest in social software because they need to support more
fluid communications, improve visibility across their organizations, stimulate idea
sharing, and support expertise location and information sharing within teams and around
projects. Activity streams, social analytics and social networking software continue
to grow in popularity as tools to achieve these objectives. Mobility support (especially
for media tablets) and gamification support have also emerged as important factors.
Market Overview
The past 12 months have seen increased market consolidation, with the following major
developments:
- blueKiwi was acquired by Atos, the second-largest professional services provider in
Europe.
- Following an investment by Bedford Funding (a private-equity technology investment
fund), Socialtext, while remaining an independent product, has become closely aligned
with Peoplefluent, a talent management solution provider also owned by Bedford Funding.
- SuccessFactors, which had previously acquired one of the early enterprise social networking
vendors (CubeTree) and the social learning vendor Jambok, was itself acquired by SAP.
- In perhaps the most unexpected
acquisition, Microsoft bought Yammer (see also "Yammer to Give Microsoft
Needed Dynamism in Enterprise Social Networking").
In late 2011, we also saw Jive become a public company with an IPO and a listing on
the Nasdaq stock market. This has given Jive a broader basis from which to expand
its offerings and operations.
As prominent vendors attract more customers and solidify their presence in this market,
life will get harder for the smaller vendors. Some of the large vendors currently
benefiting from general interest in social software will also need to do more to remain
competitive.
Five Routes to Sustainable Differentiation
Given the high degree of heterogeneity in this market, how to achieve sustainable
differentiation is one of the most common questions raised. What will be sufficiently
different and compelling about a product to make it more attractive and valuable than
rival offerings?
Although there is plenty of scope for technical innovation in relation to specific
functionality — in the fields of social analytics and gamification, for example —
it will become more difficult for vendors to compete on the basis of functionality
differences. Social capabilities such as rich dynamic profiles, activity streams,
embedded messages and self-service groups that once were available only from specialist
vendors are now becoming commonplace.
Prospective buyers looking for vendors that can sustain differentiation should favor
those that:
- Bundle social software with IT infrastructure services to impress IT architects by aligning and pre-integrating social capabilities with
a broad set of infrastructure services, such as directory services, content repositories,
application and portal servers, and UC services.
- Offer a "biz app" bundle to impress business decision-makers by aligning social capabilities with business
applications, such as those for CRM, talent management, software development, project
management and IT operations support.
- Develop a horizontal social layer offering to become the repository of the "enterprise social graph" by recording relationships
between people and anything that might interest them. This involves a broad integration
strategy to "socially enable" every other application or repository in order to draw
interaction and engagement data from them, as well as to direct attention and traffic
to them (see "Use This Framework to Plan the Evolution of Social Networking Your Organization").
- Focus on underserved activities by providing embedded social applications for specific end-user activities, such as
rich content creation, content reviews, project management, task management, process
modeling, data collection and reporting, decision-making, idea management and inbox
management. In this way, social capabilities can provide a fluid and conversational
supporting context and a product can set itself apart from the competition by offering
best-in-class built-in support for specific activities. Note that many activity-specific
functions are aimed directly at end users, who are often dissatisfied with the cumbersome
nature of officially supported alternative tools for these activities.
- Treat workers as individuals, bypass IT and business decision-makers and generate demand among individual workers
by offering instant gratification, simplicity, continual improvements, "coolness,"
and an overall emphasis on "getting things done," rather than ensuring control and
conformity with sanctioned but outdated technology.
Understanding these five routes to differentiation is important for buyers because
this knowledge will help them match their business priorities with vendors' products
and strategies:
- Buyers without pressing short-term priorities and wanting products well suited to
their overall information management strategy may be best served by vendors that take
the "IT bundle" route.
- Buyers looking for "social enablement" for an existing business process may be best
served by vendors taking the "biz app bundle" route.
- Buyers ready to make high-risk but potentially high-reward investments in broad social
enablement with a view to transforming specific business activities should favor vendors
taking the "horizontal layer" route or focusing on underserved activities.
Finally, all organizations should be aware of the most prominent vendors trying to
engage directly with their employees. An organization that prudently pursues a conservative
strategy aiming to minimize risk by engaging slowly with traditional IT suppliers
could actually achieve the opposite result, if individual employees shun official
systems and "do their own thing."
Given the differing backgrounds of many of the vendors, the differences in their strategies,
and the increased consolidation activity, we expect this market's volatility to remain
high. Buyers should therefore remain cautious. They must know their priorities and
which activities to support in order to choose appropriate vendors and products.
Notable Absences From This Magic Quadrant
Some important vendors did not meet all the inclusion criteria for this Magic Quadrant.
They typically lack sufficient market penetration in terms of relevant use cases,
or they target areas of functionality not covered by the inclusion criteria — but
they should still be of interest to prospective buyers of social software for the
workplace.
Box offers an online enterprise content collaboration service that combines user-friendly,
cloud-based, document-centric capabilities (including online viewers, content integration
with dozens of repositories, Web documents and desktop synchronization) with collaboration
and networking (including @mentions, discussions, comments, tasks, tags and activity
feeds), along with different computing platforms and mobile devices. Box has built
an extensive partner ecosystem with over 200 integrations, including with Microsoft
SharePoint, Office and Outlook, EMC Documentum, VMware, Citrix Systems, Good Technology,
Mobile Iron, Jive, Google Apps, NetSuite, SAP StreamWork, DocuSign, eFax, FedEx and
salesforce.com.
Google offers a broad cloud-based bundle of services as Google Apps for Business, which
includes email, calendar and file synchronization features, a browser-based office
suite and simple site-publishing capabilities for a competitive all-inclusive per-user
subscription. An optional archiving and e-discovery service is also available. Integration
with other consumer-grade Google services such as Google+, Google Maps, YouTube and
Google Translate is possible, but without business support or SLAs. Currently, interest
in Google Apps for Business is mainly focused on its email component, but Google's
ability to influence the overall social software market will increase, particularly
after the expected addition of Google+ to the bundle of supported services.
IntraLinks is best known for its secure data-sharing platforms in the banking and finance industries,
but it also has a growing presence in the field of life sciences. Its core products
are configured to support specific collaboration and information sharing in specific
contexts, such as clinical study management communications and board communications,
across organizations. IntraLinks' SaaS product includes team workspaces, task automation,
search and document-sharing capabilities, and integrates with systems such as those
of salesforce.com and Microsoft SharePoint.
Oracle WebCenter is becoming Oracle's centerpiece for user engagement in general. It has
several components relevant to this Magic Quadrant, in addition to support for portal,
content management, Web experience management, search and mashup/application development.
Oracle Social Network, a new platform in the Oracle WebCenter family, will add a horizontal
layer of social capabilities, such as support for activity streams, content sharing
and conversations. Oracle Social Network is available as part of Oracle's Cloud Social
Services offerings, initially with Oracle Fusion Applications such as Oracle Fusion
Customer Relationship Management and Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management, is integrated
with Oracle WebCenter, and will also be available as a stand-alone capability. Oracle
Social Network can be integrated with other applications in the cloud or on-premises.
Ingrid Lunden
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