Options and Challenges in the 2012 Collaboration and Social Software Marketplace |
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Every enterprise wants to succeed at "Enterprise 2.0," but industry research suggests that many initiatives remain experimental. In these early days, the technology you choose for your social and collaboration initiatives may have a major impact on your success. If you research this marketplace, you will find an increasingly confusing array of technology players, ranging from the largest software providers in the world to the smallest, often competing for the same customer. You'll also find a plethora of different business and delivery models, from commercial to open source, SaaS to on-premise. Some vendors offer all four of those options. It is important to recognize — and not enough analysts point this out — that collaboration and social software remains a fairly immature space. The nearly ubiquitous marketing jargon that obscures true product niches compounds the dilemma for would-be buyers. It turns out, though, that the major offerings do fall into specific categories, and understanding those segments goes a long way toward helping you narrow your choices. Platform Vendors: Big Is Not Always Better At the same time, all these vendors are working on enhancing their platforms, all of them are thinking actively about how to integrate social computing with other enterprise services and each can provide some level of linkages with their existing portal and document management services. They have ambitions of selling to new customers but are likely to appeal most to existing licensees. That does not mean that if you are an existing customer of another IBM/Microsoft/Oracle product that you should automatically adopt their social platform as well. This technology — and indeed, this whole industry — remains too young and experimental for any such automatic choices. Major Suites: Solid Alternatives, But Beware Silos You will also find diverse business and delivery models here. Telligent and Jive sell traditional, installed software, albeit with SaaS options. The Drupal platform is a traditional software application but is available as open source. Socialtext has expanded to become more of a collaboration and networking offering; the core of this platform lies in its wiki service. BroadVision is an all-SaaS, networking-oriented offering that has been broadly localized into several languages. BroadVision and Jive are publicly (albeit thinly) traded. Smaller Suites: Can Work Well for Mid-Sized Enterprises Specialist Players: For External Blogs and Wikis Atlassian, MediaWiki and MindTouch are primarily wiki platforms. WordPress and Say Media's Movable Type are primarily blog packages. Both vendors have had ambitions about expanding to become more full-fledged web content management offerings, but the core of each of these platforms is blogging services. Social Enterprise Layers: Collaboration as a Service, Not a Place This concept of a social layer is very new — and largely untested — but extremely promising for enterprises that are increasingly looking at collaboration and networking more as a service than a place. To be sure, both Yammer and NewsGator offer incomplete offerings in this regard. Yammer is historically a microblogging specialist with a nascent "embeddable" version. NewsGator only works on top of SharePoint and, therefore, cannot socialize other incumbent environments. Yet, both are mature, well-regarded vendors in this space. Other prominent vendors are making progress as well, including Salesforce.com's Chatter, Tibco's Tibbr and Socialcast. TONY BYRNE is the founder of the Real Story Group, an independent analyst firm that evaluates vendors so that technology buyers can make better choices. For the full "Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software" report and detailed evaluations of 20 collaboration/social products and platforms, visit www.realstorygroup.com/Reports/Collaboration. |