Research Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace

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Research Publication Date: 25 October 2010 ID Number: G00207256

Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace

Nikos Drakos, Jeffrey Mann, Carol Rozwell Successful enterprise vendors are beginning to stand out, while others are leveraging their strength in adjacent markets in order to increase their appeal.

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WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

A minority of early adopters are deploying social software products across their organizations. Others are actively investigating products with broader functionality, targeting use cases connected with internal teams, communities and employee networks. To focus more sharply on products that are achieving traction, we have raised the bar on customer feedback and testimonials in the inclusion criteria in this year's assessment. The market is attracting different kinds of vendors, including many specialist vendors that compete with vendors already established in adjacent markets. Buyers still need to be guided by a deep understanding of their own priorities. For most buyers, the hardest part is not making the technical choices but establishing business value, deciding on acceptable risk, designing appropriate governance frameworks, and overcoming culture and behavior obstacles.

MAGIC QUADRANT

Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace

Source: Gartner (October 2010) Market Overview This section outlines the trends we have observed in the past 12 months. Early adopters — typically those with a high proportion of professional employees, such as those in the services or technology industries — are going ahead with enterprisewide deployments of

social software for employee teams, communities and networking. In most other organizations there are pockets where some technologies, such as wikis, blogs and team rooms, are well established. Mainstream experimentation has moved from wiki and blog deployments to trials of social networking, tagging and microblogging (see "Survey Says E-Mail Rocks; Social Networking Used by Some, Rejected by Few, Investigated by Most"). Most organizations are still grappling with finding the right balance between risk and reward when: considering employee access and engagement with external social networking sites; setting up communities to capture informal knowledge; and discovering "freemium" tools, such as Yammer, in their organizations. Even when there are reasonable expectations of business value, these are hard to quantify in a way that would justify such deployments in opposition to those who fear time wasting, loss of quality control and system abuse. Usability and user experience design are playing as big a role in encouraging acceptance and use of these tools by employees as they do in the consumer space — at least to the extent that each individual employee has a choice as to whether to use a particular tool or not (that is, where its use is discretionary and not mandated). Buyers and initiative leaders are failing to appreciate these important factors. Vendors have a long way to go before they can "bring the consumer experience in enterprise tools," as one of the vendors has put it. A system modeled on the consumer social Web can also take advantage of the "free training" users are getting from consumer tools. Technology innovation continues with more being done on browser-based productivity suites, activity feeds and microblogging engines, widget import and export with application stores to access and manage them, "in document" collaboration, native mobile clients, at least for iPhone and BlackBerry devices, and social analytics tools. It is already evident that functional boundaries between different products are constantly shifting and that there are very few "pure" products. Most offer a blend of different capabilities, and we expect that successful products will continue to assimilate new functionality. Buyer choice is increasingly determined by existing relationships and licensing agreements, added value from preintegration with related offerings, and channel and service partners. One of the "adjacent" offerings that is often preintegrated with products in this market is that of content and document management. User-contributed content also has a life cycle (creation, storage, organization, distribution and archiving) and vendors that can leverage existing offerings or experience can be more attractive in some cases. While the best of the specialists retain usability, simplicity and some functional superiority, these can be overshadowed by second- and third-generation products from established vendors that promise "good enough" social capabilities but with integrated horizontal workplace platforms or vertical business applications. We are concerned that a focus on just good-enough social capabilities from various stack vendors will translate too often to "not good enough" benefits to encourage further innovation and adoption. Time and time again, we hear of organizations that have rolled out "social" capabilities as an infrastructure play, rather than working with the business to supercharge the performance of selected special ad hoc teams. Projects focused on specific activities and defined business outcomes are the ones that will deliver the highest return on investment. Notable Absences

Some vendors came very close to being included in this market assessment and, although they have not met all the formal inclusion criteria, they should still be of interest to readers of this report. Each of the vendors in this section may be a good option for internal team, community or networking deployments today and may be included in a future version of this Magic Quadrant if they meet all the formal criteria — especially those that relate to having a product generally available — and have achieved a certain level of market traction.

Alfresco is best known for its Java-based open-source document management offering. The Alfresco content management suite includes Alfresco Share, which combines an extensive set of capabilities for virtual teams, profiles, activity feeds and document libraries. Box.net is an online content-sharing service that is aimed primarily at small to midsize businesses and departments of larger ones. It combines user-friendly document-centric capabilities (including online viewers, Web documents and desktop synchronization) with collaboration and networking (including discussions, comments, tasks, tags and activity feeds). It is also integrated with add-ons from third-party services, such as Google Apps, NetSuite, SAP StreamWork, Zoho, eFax, FedEx and salesforce.com. BroadVision launched Clearvale, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business networking offering. At one level, it offers a comprehensive set of capabilities for collaboration and social networking within an organization. Beyond this, however, Clearvale can also be used to create networks of networks that work across different businesses. BroadVision is exploring a franchise model that can enable third parties to use Clearvale as a cloud-based "shell" to combine social networking with other custom/premium applications. Cisco Quad is a modular platform for social collaboration. It combines a broad set of capabilities, including rich profiles, social metadata and video sharing, all on top of a common content store and "pluggable" framework that integrates with other instant messaging, voice, conferencing and video services. As of October 2010, it was in limited availability. Cornerstone OnDemand offers Cornerstone Connect, with a broad set of collaboration and business social networking capabilities. It is most often deployed as part of its SaaS talent management solution, for which Cornerstone OnDemand is better known, in an integrated environment that combines performance management, learning and collaboration. FatWire Software offers TeamUp as a separate team collaboration product that has gained some traction among creative marketing teams and media agencies dealing with rich-media content. In addition, FatWire has introduced new community, user-generated content, gadget and social analytics capabilities in 2010 in its flagship Web Experience Management platform. KickApps has its main focus on externally facing customer deployments but also recognizes the synergy and opportunity for private employee networking and collaboration, especially in support of social CRM. Sales and marketing, customer service and support staff can use KickApps services to work together within a shared environment that brings information and insights gleaned from the customer communities supported on the same platform (or gathered from the public social Web). At the same time, its products can be integrated with internal workplace environments or transactional business applications (such as Microsoft's SharePoint, salesforce.com or IBM WebSphere Commerce). Moxie Software (previously known as nGenera) offers solutions for employee and customer engagement built on the company's Spaces social collaboration platform. Apart from technology, Moxie has a track record in strategic consulting on innovation, collaboration and human-centered design. Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g includes several components that are relevant in the context of this report, in addition to support for portal, business process management, content management, search and mashup/application development. Two of these components for social collaboration are: WebCenter Spaces with social networking, wikis, blogs and social tagging; and WebCenter Intelligent Collaboration for expertise location and connection brokering, which is priced separately.

Salesforce.com's Salesforce Chatter is a collaboration and social networking layer between Force.com infrastructure services and salesforce.com business applications for sales and customer service. It is modeled on Facebook and Twitter, with an emphasis on user profiles, microblogging and activity feeds that individuals use to keep track of what interests them. Status messages can originate not only from people, but also from other Force.com applications. Yammer offers a social networking and microblogging platform for enterprise collaboration. Its freemium model is popular with many end users who have introduced it into their organizations. It would be of interest to those looking for a private Facebook-like platform with additional capabilities, that now include group private messaging, Q&A, polls, group events and third-party applications. Market Definition/Description We view this market as consisting of products that are used within an organization, primarily among employees, to support teaming, communities and networking. The 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. The business use of these products varies in terms of degree of formality and openness — from team information sharing and project coordination among a small, homogeneous group, to sharing best practices within a business unit, to encouraging networking and knowledge transfer among employees across the whole organization. In general terms, products that compete in this market help users to:

Find out about each other, personally and/or professionally.

Mine their own networks of contacts and acquaintances for advice, references and referrals.

Form teams, communities or informal groups.

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.

Learn from others' expertise. Some 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 to establish and strengthen personal relationships, develop trust and, ultimately, reduce friction and accelerate the business processes in which people are engaged.

Accessing relevant knowledge and expertise that can be used to formulate a plan of action when decisions need to be made. Related Markets: Externally Facing Social Software and Social CRM Social software has matured enough to support at least three distinct software markets. Hence, Gartner has published two new Magic Quadrants in 2010 also focusing on social software:

"Magic Quadrant for Externally Facing Social Software," describing the market for general-purpose products that support communities aimed at people outside the enterprise.

"Magic Quadrant for Social CRM," profiling vendors that extend CRM processes into external communities to support sales, service and marketing. The markets studied in those Magic Quadrants and the market examined in this one — the market for products that support social networking within an enterprise — attract different sets of vendors, and the dynamics differ because the needs of the three groups of users differ. In such closely related markets, some vendors will naturally appear in two, or even all three, Magic Quadrants. More details on the differences between these markets are discussed in "Introducing Social Software in the Workplace and Externally Facing Social Software: Market Definition Update." Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria Inclusion in this Magic Quadrant is based on an assessment of the market presence and functional capabilities of any product that is generally available in this market, and where the vendors could provide a positive "Yes" answer to all these questions: Focus on Teams, Communities and Networking Q1: Do you offer a product or products that are packaged, marketed and sold specifically to support internal teams, communities and networking within an organization? General Purpose (Not for a Specific Business Process or Vertical Industry) Q2: Is the product being used for general-purpose internal teams, communities and networks (that is, it is not limited to a specific business process, such as project management, e-learning or customer service, and it is not limited to a specific industry, such as publishing or entertainment)? Market Presence (a)

Q3: Are there at least 15 different customers that are actively using the product primarily among their internal users? Market Presence (b) Q4: Are there at least 100,000 active internal users (seats) for the product, in total, among all your customers? Market Presence (c) Q5: Can you provide us with four named customers using your product to support internal teams, communities or networks, with at least 5,000 active users each, willing to provide feedback to Gartner? Functionality

Q6: Does the product support all the following minimum functionality, "out of the box," without the need to purchase any other products from you or from other vendors — apart from products mentioned in answer to Q1? Minimum functionality required from products: User management: The ability to create, modify or retire user accounts.

User profiles: Information about each user can that be accessed by other users.

Roles and access control: Support for multiple roles (for example, editor, facilitator, community manager, moderator) with associated access controls.

Configurable group, project, team or community areas: End users with the right permissions can create themed areas for a group, project, team or community.

Document sharing: The ability to upload, store, organize and share documents.

Discussion forums: Support for a persistent environment to post questions and answers or to have general discussions.

Blogs: End-user instant publishing functionality that displays entries in reverse chronological order and permits comments from others.

Wikis: Group authoring of collections of pages with support for "click to edit," change tracking and internal linking. The products have been evaluated on the minimum, as well as additional optional, functionality. Changes in the Inclusion Criteria of This Magic Quadrant Compared With 2009 This section describes adjustments to the inclusion criteria from those in our 2009 market assessment. The most significant change in the inclusion criteria is that we raised the number of reference customers from which we would like to receive feedback, from three to four, and added another new condition that each of these reference customers must have at least 5,000 active users. Where the vendor could not provide such reference customer contact information and Gartner could not independently confirm such customer numbers (for example, based on Gartner inquiry calls) we did not include the vendor in this assessment. We also raised the total active user threshold from 75,000 to 100,000. As a result of these changes, some of the vendors in 2009's assessment are not included here. Also, although we look for evidence of market presence in order to exclude some of the very small vendors, we deliberately do not have an explicit test for minimum revenue. This means that the Magic Quadrant includes products from less established vendors and vendors experimenting with new pricing models, and also includes open-source products. This helps to reflect some of the innovation and alternative sourcing options available in this market. Although the size, revenue and profitability of the vendors were taken into account when assessing their ability to execute, you should be aware that some of the vendors here represent more risk than those in Magic Quadrants with a high revenue threshold. Vendors Added

NewsGator (following its acquisition of Tomoye).

SuccessFactors (following its acquisition of CubeTree).

XWiki. Vendors Dropped

Blogtronix.

Central Desktop.

CubeTree (acquired by SuccessFactors).

CustomerVision.

EMC.

eTouch.

FatWire Software.

Google.

Leverage Software.

MindTouch.

Mzinga.

Neighborhood America (now known as INgage Networks).

PBworks.

Siteforum.

Tomoye (acquired by NewsGator). These vendors are not included in 2010's assessment for one of the following reasons: they were acquired; they changed their focus away from internal teams, communities and networks; or they did not meet the market presence conditions — and, in particular, the requirement to provide contacts for four reference customers with at least 5,000 users each. Evaluation Criteria Ability to Execute Product/Service: The overall vendor product/service functionality rating was developed 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. Some of the functionality we looked for includes social network analysis, browser-based productivity suites, document repository integration, social tagging, social bookmarking, social search, general analytics, expertise location, group formation based on common interests, content/people ratings, activity feeds, people/content recommendations and mobility. Also, as part of the overall score, we took into account the maturity of the product (the number of versions released and how long the product has been available) and any evidence of large-scale deployments. 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, dedicated employee numbers), and the degree to which the organization is committed to this part of its business.

Sales Execution/Pricing: This describes the vendor's ability to sell to large organizations, its price transparency and straightforward sales process, consistent revenue growth in the past 12 to 24 months, and the opportunity to convert existing customers to products with new or additional capabilities. Market Responsiveness and Track Record: This refers to a vendor's ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and market dynamics change. Specifically, we looked at evidence of this in the history of the product (acquisitions, development and updates, for example) and in the actions and comments of the product management team. Marketing Execution: We looked for evidence of mind share, thought leadership and brand recognition, and for any specific marketing initiatives (white papers, events, microsites, social media campaigns) that may have helped to promote them. One particularly effective approach is for senior executives to be active participants in ongoing online conversations via their blogs or comments. We also took into account the size of the marketing organization. Customer Experience: We looked for customer feedback from vendor-supplied references, Gartner inquiries and other customer-facing interactions, such as Gartner conferences. Customer experiences were rated based on the vendor's ability to help customers achieve positive business value, as well as sustained user adoption, and quality implementation and ongoing support. We also took into account the mix of customers (large as well as smaller organizations), overall customer numbers, and evidence of outstanding customer successes. Operations: Factors included the quality of the organizational structure — skills, experiences, programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis. We also looked at technology and service partners, training and certification programs, R&D resources, the presence of any independent activities adding value to the core product (for example, open-source add-on modules), the size of the support organization and the presence of active customer communities for peer support, for input into R&D. Table 1 shows weightings for our specific evaluation criteria.

Table 1. Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria Weighting Product/Service High Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial, Strategy, High Organization) Sales Execution/Pricing Standard Market Responsiveness and Track Record Standard Marketing Execution Standard Customer Experience High Operations High Source: Gartner (October 2010) Completeness of Vision Market Understanding: The 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, communications services), an urgency to preintegrate them, a tolerance and acknowledgement of

other existing but related technologies from other vendors, and an overall vision of the space that focuses more on supporting people-centric activities and less on a formal, process-centric view of collaboration. Marketing Strategy: The degree to which the vendor's marketing approach aligns with (and/or leverages) emerging trends and the overall direction of the market. In particular, we looked at the "use cases" promoted in the vendors' marketing messages, its online activities and any programs for educating and priming the market connected with social interaction support (for example, "try before you buy," open-source versions and hosted versions). Sales Strategy: We looked at the level of channel activity, and any strategy for converting large numbers of early adopters to high-end or broader deployments. Offering (Product) Strategy: This is the degree to which the vendor's product road map reflects demand trends and opportunities to create demand in the market and fill current gaps or weaknesses. We also looked at interoperability with communications services (e-mail, instant messaging, presence, Web conferencing and Internet Protocol telephony), mobile support, the neutrality of infrastructure dependencies (operating system, directory and security), and the alignment with related products from the same or other vendors (specifically for content management, portal functionality and search). Business Model: We looked at the levels of investment needed to achieve profitability and revenue growth, the balance of service and license revenue, evidence of success with repeatable revenue (subscription licensing, for example) and low-cost distribution, development and support (for example, using open-source licensing). Vertical/Industry Strategy: The level of emphasis the vendor places on vertical solutions, and the vendor's depth of vertical expertise. Innovation: The degree to which the vendor is investing in R&D directed toward development of the tools, and the extent to which the vendor demonstrates "creative energy." Examples include: a commitment to browser-based client technologies (in particular, Ajax); browser-based rich authoring; real-time co-authoring; offline support; social network analysis; social metrics (popularity, sentiment, influence); marketplace for modules or plug-ins; activity feeds and related APIs; and adaptive people and content recommendations. Geographic Strategy: We examined the vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of regions outside the corporate headquarters' location, directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries, as appropriate for that geography and market. Table 2 shows weightings for our specific evaluation criteria.

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 Low Vertical/Industry Strategy Low

Evaluation Criteria Weighting Innovation High Geographic Strategy Standard Source: Gartner (October 2010) Leaders Leaders are well-established vendors with widely used social software and collaboration offerings. Their leadership has been established through an early recognition of user needs in this market, their overall market presence, and their success in delivering user-friendly and solution- focused suites with broad capabilities. Challengers Vendors in the Challengers' quadrant offer solutions that are poised to move them into leadership but have not yet done so. They have a strong market presence in general, or strong products, and the market position and resources to become Leaders. But they may not have either the same functional breadth, marketing strategy or rate of innovation as those in the Visionaries' quadrant. Challengers do have an established presence, credibility and viability, and once their products move beyond a good-enough baseline, they will likely leverage their existing customer base to leap-frog others into the Leaders' quadrant at some point in the future. Visionaries Visionaries in the market demonstrate a strong understanding of current and future market trends and directions, such as the importance of a flexible and transparent collaboration environment, as well as the value of mutual reinforcement between tools that encourage user contribution and tools that encourage bottom-up group and structure formation. Their products and product road maps display a penchant for innovation, especially in terms of architecture and lightweight integration, while their marketing and R&D efforts are boosted by their alignment with the open- source ecosystem. The Visionaries in this market have not exhibited the scope of delivery of the Challengers or Leaders, but have demonstrated vision across a range of capabilities. Niche Players Niche Players form the bulk of the vendors in this Magic Quadrant. They provide useful focused technology, understand the changing market dynamics, and are working toward evolving their product capabilities. However, they are still held back by breadth of functionality, by product road map urgency, or by lack of market traction. Many of the smaller vendors may enjoy success relative to their size, but they need to exploit every opportunity to grow and establish their positions before their competitive differentiation begins to erode. As the social software market continues to mature, pockets of specialization can solidify. Therefore, a viable alternative strategy for a minority of smaller vendors is to focus on niche markets serving specific verticals or supporting specific activities. Many of these vendors are unlikely to break out of the Niche Players' quadrant, even though they may continue to have a long-term viable business. Vendor Strengths and Cautions Atlassian Atlassian is a Challenger because it has demonstrated the ability to sell its wiki-centric product to a very large number of organizations but it has yet to persuade them to trust it as a broader collaboration and social software platform.

Strengths

Atlassian's Confluence is a popular early example of a wiki-centric suite. New social capabilities were introduced with Confluence 3.2 and 3.3, including link autocompletion, embedding as well as exporting OpenSocial gadgets, enhanced editing, file drag and drop, and Office 2007 integration.

Atlassian has approximately 250 employees, a network of partners, and offices in the U.S., Australia, Europe and Brazil. Confluence is a global product used by more than 10,000 organizations in over 90 countries across multiple industries.

Atlassian has a straightforward sales process that relies more on transparency and Web distribution than on a traditional sales force. It also offers low server-based pricing (starting at $10 for 10-user teams and capped at $12,000 for an unlimited number of users) and a try-before-you-buy option. It offers both on-premises and hosted options.

Confluence is Java-based, supports several runtime engines and databases, uses several open-source components as part of the core product and the runtime environment, and makes all the source code available for inspection. Cautions

Aside from its strong wiki capability, social networking and blogging, other social capabilities are relatively weak. However, the company does manage a rich repository of plug-ins that extend Confluence's capabilities but can add to cost and complexity.

Atlassian needs to attract more nontechnical buyers.

The "low touch" sales and support model that is serving Atlassian well in smaller deals can deter buyers looking for enterprise deployments. bluekiwi Bluekiwi is in the Visionaries' quadrant because of its understanding of social interaction support and its vision of a single solution for internal employee networking, external branded communities and social media engagement. Strengths

Bluekiwi gained early traction with large European organizations, as well as with small and midsize businesses, with a product focusing on information sharing and employee networking. During 2010, it established a base in the U.S. and has launched additional offerings that leverage the same platform but target external community management and social media engagement.

It offers comprehensive functionality, with strong participation, social networking analytics, microblogging, rich-media support including video, extensive community management, polling and ideation. These are combined in a single platform that can simultaneously support internal networking, external communities and social media engagement.

It puts strong emphasis on ease of use and an engaging user experience.

The company has a geographic advantage in Europe.

Bluekiwi's relationship with Dassault Systemes will give it additional leverage in the market and a stronger solution-based focus (especially for supporting product life cycle management). Cautions

Despite some growth in 2008, bluekiwi is a small company with fewer than 50 employees, limited resources and limited activity outside Europe.

Its product is weak in supporting structured collaboration, such as document libraries and task or project tracking.

It has limited enterprisewide deployments. Drupal Drupal is in the Visionaries' quadrant because of its use of the open-source model to drive development, adoption and popularity, while providing commercial support and enterprise services via organizations such as Acquia. Strengths

Drupal is proven in large, high-profile deployments. It has an active 600,000-member developer community, a track record of community support and a growing ecosystem of service providers.

Acquia is a venture-capital-funded organization that offers a commercially supported version of Drupal, and is headed by the founder of Drupal, putting it very close to the open-source project's activities.

Drupal's strong, content-centric, community and Web application foundation is enhanced by hundreds of modules, including many for social interaction support. Cautions

Modules from third parties are a source of strength, but quality can be variable. Their use requires careful evaluation and ongoing support by engaging directly with the developer community or through the services of consulting and support organizations such as Acquia.

The breadth of the platform functions is an advantage, but it also contributes to deployment complexity (though "install profiles" such as Open Atrium and Drupal Commons and services such as Drupal Gardens will help to reduce this complexity).

Acquia is growing in terms of number of employees, revenue and partner ecosystem but, as a relatively small vendor, it has limited abilities to meet the requirements of large or particularly demanding projects. Ektron Ektron built its eIntranet social software product on top of its flagship Web content management system. This approach is gaining traction with employee communities and networks.

Strengths

Ektron's eIntranet combines strong content management with activity streams, blogs, wikis, discussions, profiles, social networks and dashboards, as well as workflow, task management and a sophisticated server synchronization engine.

It is built on the Microsoft .NET framework and uses the Microsoft technology stack. Ektron's SharePoint Connector enables a bidirectional flow of documents and information between the two systems.

Ektron's widget framework can be used to import widgets from other platforms. The eIntranet includes many third-party widgets, including YouTube, salesforce.com, Flickr, SharePoint and Facebook.

The Ektron developer community has more than 7,000 registered users. Ektron Exchange is a code- and widget-sharing site where Ektron employees, partners and customers share add-ons.

Ektron has a well-designed partner program that gives it an extensive global partner network. Cautions

Despite growing success with internal deployments among its customer base, Ektron needs to build up its visibility as a collaboration and social software vendor independently of its reputation in content management. As it does so, it will need commensurate customer support capability.

Customers use Ektron's products primarily to add social facilities to the company's Web content management product. It appeals less to customers that do not use Ektron to manage their Web content. EPiServer EPiServer's Relate+ product focuses on managing user-generated content and enabling collaboration between community members. Its main use is in creating and managing externally facing communities, but EPiServer also has a growing business in internally facing deployments. Strengths

EPiServer's Relate+ Intranet Edition represents an attempt to leverage the strength of EPiServer's platform, which already supports large external communities, in a new context (internal deployments).

The product's gadget architecture allows the quick introduction of new features based on the underlying platform organized as iGoogle-like dashboards. Standard gadgets include moderation, abuse reporting and community management analytics. Prebuilt connectors provide access to other systems, including SharePoint.

It benefits from active developers and implementation partners, particularly in Europe. The open-source templates available from EPiServer make partner implementations faster and easier.

It also has a large and active partner network — all sales are via the partner network — mainly in Europe and, in particular, the Nordic countries.

Cautions

The company is only starting to establish its presence outside Europe.

It has limited wiki functionality and weak reporting.

Internal, behind-the-firewall deployments are a growing but still small part of EPiServer's business. Huddle Huddle is in the Visionaries' quadrant because of the speed at which its product has evolved through partnerships and its innovative viral adoption model. Strengths

Huddle v.7 is a SaaS collaboration offering that emphasizes a combination of live (same time, any place) and asynchronous (any time, any place) collaboration.

Huddle competes on usability (modeled on consumer services such as Facebook), low complexity and a free limited version that encourages viral growth within and between organizations.

The product is simple to use. It is strong in discussions, document sharing and structured collaboration (shared calendars and task management). It offers deep integration with LinkedIn, Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Office, and it has Web- and voice-conferencing capabilities. Cautions

The company is oriented toward structured collaboration and has weaknesses in social networking.

Despite growing to approximately 60 people, establishing a U.S. presence and securing additional funding in 2010, Huddle is still a small organization with few large-scale deployments.

Its SaaS-only offering may not appeal to some enterprises. IBM IBM has established an early presence in this market and is continuing to gain market traction. Strengths

IBM Lotus Connections 2.5 offers a broad social software suite that includes profiles, communities, discussions, files, activities, tagging, blogging, microblogging, bookmarking and wiki functionality that can be used together or independently. Also available are additional tools, such as social network visualization using IBM Atlas for Lotus Connections and measurement and reporting tools.

There is evidence of very large deployments and flexible deployment options as independent modules, or as a set of services accessible via a browser, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Outlook, a portal, mobile devices or via Office applications. Lotus Connections is available as an on-premises, hosted and public cloud (LotusLive) offering.

Plans for Lotus Connections 3 in 4Q10 include expanded mobility support for Android and iPad devices, rich media, enhanced discussion forums, activity feeds, content filtering, recommendations using social analytics and Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) API support for making Lotus Connections 3 files available to CMIS clients.

IBM Global Services offers complementary technical, strategic and business services with an industry and process focus. Cautions

For some scenarios, customers may need to deploy both Connections and IBM's Lotus Quickr, which will bring additional capabilities, including integration with enterprise content management (ECM) systems, but may also add to cost and complexity.

It has weak authoring capabilities. Igloo Software Igloo Software has strengthened significantly its position as a Niche Player since 2009 by continuing to expand its visibility and reputation as an enterprise vendor. During the past year, Igloo has invested in staffing, product development and building market awareness. Strengths

The Igloo community platform is a SaaS offering with regular and frequent updates every 45 to 60 days.

Igloo supports collaborative document management through a desktop client for easy file sharing and editing, in-line editing, version control, advanced search, and integration with SharePoint.

Existing enterprise applications can be integrated via an open API and drag-and-drop widget architecture. Other add-ons include Microsoft Active Directory and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), BlackBerry Client and salesforce.com widgets.

A growing partner channel offers greater horizontal and vertical capabilities to customers. Cautions

The company should continue to build up its visibility and reputation as an enterprise vendor.

Igloo is predominantly a cloud vendor, with both single-tenant and multitenant solutions, but will also provide on-premises solutions if necessary. Jive Jive has won several large corporate customers, some of which have multimillion-dollar investments in its software and services. Jive is a Leader because of its mature product, solution focus, vision of bridging internal and external communities, and strong evidence of market acceptance.

Strengths

Jive is one of the largest social software vendors, with 250 employees, 15 million active internal and external users, and good traction with enterprisewide internal deployments.

The company has a strong and experienced management team that has had success in growing software companies, and a focused go-to-market strategy and perspective on social software and social business processes.

Jive delivers integrated blogs, wikis, ranking and voting, user profiles and a broad range of social capabilities that enable it to serve both internal and external users. Jive has integrated social media monitoring functionality via its acquisition of Filtrbox and can connect to content repositories and enterprise applications. In addition, Jive has announced plans for its own Apps Market, and it has a Jive developer community.

Jive recently announced several technology relationships, including relationships with Google and an agreement with Twitter to license its Firehose for use in its analytics product. It also announced improved support for microblogging, video, presence and iPhones. Cautions

Jive may find it a challenge to expand its sales and support organization, as well as its technology and integration partnerships, sufficiently to support its growth. Jive has started developing its sales and support presence outside North America, but it is small at this time.

Jive may be at a competitive disadvantage to platform or other workplace vendors that lack its social software capabilities but have a broader and deeper presence in global enterprises.

Jive has not yet developed a multitenant architecture for its core SBS platform (though the company does use virtualization to achieve many of the benefits of multitenancy). Liferay Liferay uses its popular open-source Liferay Portal as a Web platform through which to deliver social software. In addition to the portal product, Liferay Social Office provides dedicated collaboration and social software capabilities. Strengths

Liferay offers a portal-centric platform for those looking to develop and integrate social interaction and community support in a flexible environment.

Social Office is a natural add-on for those committed to the popular open-source Liferay Portal server.

Liferay has a healthy developer and partner ecosystem.

Liferay's origin as an open-source project makes its product cost-effective, flexible and easy to extend. Cautions

Liferay needs to work harder to build its reputation as a vendor of products, rather than of a technology platform.

Liferay offers social software in both the Portal and the Social Office products. This overlap can create confusion among customers.

Although there is good evidence that Liferay Portal is being used to provide collaboration and social networking in the context of large portal deployments, Liferay Social Office is still relatively unknown in this market. Microsoft Microsoft's SharePoint Server 2010 has achieved wide market acceptance as a broad platform for enterprise collaboration, content management, portals, search and social software. SharePoint integrates with Exchange, Office and Lync (previously known as Office Communications Server) using standard features. Strengths

SharePoint 2010 embodies a broad range of capabilities, particularly content management, search and portal, as well as traditional team collaboration and social computing. It is poised to build on the success of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, which we estimate to be in broad deployment in about 50% of organizations.

There is accelerating demand for, and accumulating evidence of, large-scale successful deployments for social networking, based on SharePoint's My Sites functionality, to complement existing structured collaboration deployments.

SharePoint 2010 introduced important functionality improvements in terms of browser- based rich-text authoring, coauthoring, social tagging, dynamic profiles, activity feeds, rich-media support, more user-friendly document support with browser previewing, mobile access, and better offline support.

Microsoft's platform focus and the presence of a broad and deep ecosystem of developers and system integrators add to its strength, as do third-party software developers that extend SharePoint or use it as a basis for their products. Cautions

Meeting advanced requirements with SharePoint often demands customized programming, which creates a long-term burden for customers.

Users report that managing and governing large or complex SharePoint deployments requires deep technical skills and careful design.

While the 2010 release has moved more toward a Web 2.0 approach, SharePoint retains its document and file orientation. This can be familiar and reassuring to new users, but is somewhat out of step with overall social software trends. NewsGator NewsGator acquired Tomoye, an early pioneer of communities of practice software. Together, they are pursuing a strategy of filling functional gaps in the popular SharePoint collaboration platform. (NewsGator's ranking in this Magic Quadrant is based on the assessment of NewsGator's Tomoye product, which can run in a stand-alone mode, as well as integrated with SharePoint, and not on NewsGator's Social Sites, which requires SharePoint.)

Strengths

NewsGator Tomoye can be used stand-alone or in conjunction with Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services to add community building and social interaction capabilities, such as microblogging, idea management, social analytics and expert location.

It has experience in collaboration and knowledge management, with many large and satisfied customers, especially in the defense sector.

Customers have made positive comments about its end-user flexibility and Tomoye's responsiveness.

It has a formal customer education program for building successful communities, reinforced by active customer communities. Cautions

NewsGator is a growing but small organization (with fewer than 100 employees).

Customers using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 or Microsoft SharePoint 2010 need to determine whether those products will be "good enough" for them before they can justify the additional cost of a NewsGator offering. Novell Novell has a capable product but needs to improve its visibility and market acceptance. Strengths

Novell Teaming combines team collaboration, workflow, e-forms and flexible support for communities and social interaction.

Novell has an established presence in enterprise messaging, a commitment to collaboration and social interaction support, and an innovative cloud-based collaboration environment currently in preview release (Novell Pulse).

Its product can be deployed with or without the complementary communications capabilities (Web conferencing, presence and telephony integration), and can benefit from Novell's DataSync technology for connecting to external repositories and business applications.

The company has a global channel and partner ecosystem. Cautions

Product visibility beyond the existing Novell customer base is limited.

Novell needs to improve its visibility beyond IT buyers.

There is uncertainty over the status of Novell's collaboration assets in the event of a change of ownership. Open Text Open Text strengthened its position as a Challenger by enhancing the social capabilities in its ECM Suite.

Strengths

Open Text Social Media brings together a broad set of capabilities to support teams, communities and employee networks through personal dashboards, dynamic profiles, blogs and microblogs, social search, mobility and document repositories.

Open Text has an enterprise focus with vertical differentiation, as well as a broad geographic presence, and views social capabilities as critical to its product evolution.

It has added value as part of a larger ECM Suite. Cautions

Open Text's social software capabilities are expanding into innovative areas, such as microblogging, activity feeds and semantic navigation but the new social software capabilities do not yet have a large number of customer implementations.

Mixing products with different histories, dependencies and functionality within the ECM Suite could add complexity to the sales and deployment process. Realcom US Realcom US was formed through the merger of Realcom and AskMe in 2008. It is in the Niche Players' quadrant, despite its long track record with large-scale knowledge management deployments, because it needs to evolve its product, increase its visibility and gain more market traction. Strengths

Realcom's AskMe Enterprise 9 has a knowledge management orientation, with a track record in high-end deployments and strong social networking (including social network analysis), expertise location, e-mail integration and search capabilities, especially when building Q&A repositories. A separate product provides similar functionality but leverages Microsoft's SharePoint for the core user management and content capabilities.

The company has a strong presence in Japan. Cautions

It has limited market visibility and no presence outside the U.S. and Japan.

It has weak document handling, content authoring and networking capabilities.

Realcom is a small organization with approximately 40 employees. Saba Saba is leveraging its strong presence in adjacent markets as it expands its collaboration functionality for broader workplace deployment. It has put significant effort into building its social networking functionality during the past year. Strengths

Saba is an established public company with more than 700 employees, a strong partner program and a global presence. Because of its strong financial position, large enterprise

customer base and road map plans, Saba is well positioned to expand its footprint in the collaboration market.

The company's main social software product is Saba Collaboration Suite, which includes Saba Centra Web conferencing with Saba Live enterprise business networking. The suite is built on a unified resource model that integrates users' interactions across all resource types (for example, wikis, blogs, discussion forums) and enables analytics across people and resource types. Saba Live search automatically "learns" about users based on their activities. There are various methods for expertise identification and location, as well as multiple rating mechanisms usable across resource types.

The unified user profile uses information from Saba's people management and learning offerings, and also integrates with LDAP/Active Directory.

Saba's security model provides fine-grained access control that is set at the group or work space level and can be overridden, if required, at the user or resource level (for example, page, file). Cautions

Saba is well known in the corporate learning systems market but is still establishing itself as a major player in the social software and collaboration market, where its major products to date have been Saba Centra Web conferencing and Saba Communities, a precursor to Saba Live.

Currently, Saba does not offer OpenSocial support. At the time of writing this report, the connector for Microsoft SharePoint and the social connector for Microsoft Outlook were in preproduction beta testing. Socialtext Socialtext is a Visionary vendor that has strengthened its position through continued innovation and market traction. Strengths

Socialtext was one of the first software companies to focus on social software. It has a sizable customer base, mind share and large-scale deployments of its product. It is approved by the U.S. General Services Administration (http://apps.gov) as a cloud solution for use by government agencies.

It offers innovative new capabilities, including Socialtext Connect for integrating business application events into a social collaborative environment, and deeper SharePoint integration. It also offers Signals, a Twitter-like microblogging module accessible through a dedicated desktop client as well mobile devices, a dashboard mechanism based on the OpenSocial standard, and a wiki-based spreadsheet.

It receives positive feedback from users regarding profiles and tagging for expertise location and group-based activity feed filtering. Cautions

Socialtext is a small organization with fewer than 100 employees that needs to do more to build its reputation as an enterprise vendor.

SuccessFactors In 2010, SuccessFactors acquired CubeTree, a Visionary in our 2009 assessment. SuccessFactors aims to combine the best-of-breed social collaboration capabilities of CubeTree with its enterprise credibility and to add value by aligning them with its overall business performance strategy. Strengths

It is an intuitive, user-centric, SaaS-only collaboration and networking offering.

It combines top-down policy implementation with bottom-up flexibility.

It has a continuously expanding, broad set of capabilities with an emphasis on activity sharing, dynamic profiles integrated with HR applications, social filtering, rich authoring and document integration, mobility, as well as integration with dozens of online services.

It uses the viral freemium adoption model, as well as the market presence and reputation of SuccessFactors as an enterprise vendor. Cautions

SuccessFactors' CubeTree is still a new product and has a limited number of deployments.

It is SaaS-only, which may not appeal to some organizations.

The absorption of CubeTree into the larger SuccessFactors organization may damage its agility and focus in this market. Telligent Telligent has strengthened its position and is building a strong presence both in internally and externally facing deployments with a broad common platform and rich social analytics. Strengths

The company has succeeded with externally facing customer communities and offers a comprehensive set of capabilities. These include a strong social analytics and intelligence tool that provides deep insight into the health of the community and the makeup of the community by user type, and Social Fingerprints, which reflects the contribution and participation activities of each individual, and measures the popularity and sentiment of community content.

Telligent has social technology products directed at externally facing communities (Telligent Community) and at workforce implementations (Telligent Enterprise). Both use the Telligent Evolution platform, which provides integration, scalability, security and other services.

The product can integrate with different repositories and applications, including Microsoft SharePoint, Outlook and Active Directory.

It has growing numbers of customers, especially at the high end.

It has flexible licensing options and a global partnership program, including a number of partners that build applications (for example, calendars, innovation, workflows) on top of the platform.

Cautions

Although very good in terms of general community support, there are still functional gaps in team collaboration support (for example, tasks, simple workflow and projects) that can be addressed via integration with other products or through partner applications.

Telligent is growing fast but is still relatively small, with fewer than 200 employees. ThoughtFarmer ThoughtFarmer offers a well-liked and capable product, but the company is in the Niche Players' quadrant because of its limited experience with large deployments. Strengths

ThoughtFarmer targets internal deployments with comprehensive team collaboration and informal interaction functionality, including page creation via e-mail, mailing list integration, an organizational relationship browser, faceted browsing, PDF generation from collections of wiki pages, and document support (attach, limited preview, round-trip editing, version control). A SharePoint connector adds in-browser document editing/coediting and search of SharePoint assets.

It receives consistently positive user feedback about ease of use and appreciation of innovative features such as "on the fly" content translation. Cautions

ThoughtFarmer is a small organization with fewer than 50 employees, a small client base and no evidence of large-scale deployments for more than 5,000 users. Traction Software Traction Software's sophisticated authoring and collaboration environment needs more visibility and market presence. Strengths

Traction Software's TeamPage r.5.0 has innovative capabilities. These include e-mail integration, paragraph-level comments, sophisticated authoring, widgets, rich-media support, PDF/Word export from collections of wiki pages (with tables of contents, cross- references and appendices), document- as well as site-level versioning and moderation, content repurposing, and Twitter-like status with follow model, e-mail and Jabber alerting. These are implemented in a common content model enabling top-down or search-driven navigation across profiles, activities and any other content. Tasks and project support are due to be delivered in 4Q10.

There have been positive customer comments on the responsiveness of the Traction organization.

The introduction of the Google Web Toolkit has resulted in a faster, multibrowser, rich user interface experience, and an optional faceted search engine is available through partnership with Attivio.

The company offers attractive unlimited user pricing options that encourage unmetered corporationwide "visitor" usage.

Cautions

Traction is still a very small organization (with only 10 employees) that needs to grow if it is to be trusted for larger deployments. TWiki Twiki Inc. can capitalize on the popularity of the open-source TWiki.org by moving beyond the "technical enthusiasts" that have been a core constituent of its success so far. Strengths

TWiki.org provides a popular, open-source, enterprise, wiki-centric collaboration platform reporting 10,000 downloads per month, several large-scale customer deployments, and an active developer and user community with a good track record in peer support. It is approved by the U.S. General Services Administration as a cloud solution for use by government agencies.

TWiki v.5 is focused on usability and ease of deployment improvements.

There are OnDemand and managed virtual appliance deployment options, along with process-specific prepackaged functionality for project management, document management, CRM and sales automation, and an innovative disaster management dashboard preintegrated with weather and other data sources.

It has core wiki-centric functionality extended by a growing number of community plug- ins (currently more than 250) that include task management, calendar integration, online spreadsheets, charting, mail integration and a powerful mechanism to capture and display structured content by integrating data feeds and workflows. Another module (Twiki Connect, which is currently proprietary) adds rich profiles, activity feeds, social networking and tagging. Cautions

Twiki Inc. needs to produce enough revenue from the support options and add-ons to the free TWiki.org version to continue evolving the product.

The quality of the available plug-ins is variable. Users must conduct their own assessment beyond the 40 or so plug-ins certified and supported by Twiki Inc.

The commercial organization behind the product is still quite small, with fewer than 20 employees. XWiki XWiki offers a wiki-centric product with additional functionality on a flexible platform. XWiki needs to build on its limited success by gaining some traction outside its home market. Strengths

XWiki's offering embodies the most popular functionality of established wiki products along with broader capabilities, such as document sharing, office connectors, in-browser annotations, previewing, group and community support, and activity streams. A built-in form and macro scripting language makes it easy for partners, developers and power users to customize and build new applications. A SaaS version is planned for 4Q10.

There is an open-source license (Lesser General Public License) for the complete product that allows XWiki to leverage existing open-source technology, attract developer contributions and create demand for commercial support.

It has large-scale deployments in Europe. Cautions

Although XWiki has some customers outside Europe, its client base is mostly in its home market in France.

Failure to produce enough revenue from the support option services related to the free XWiki version will impact negatively the evolution of the product.

It is a small organization (approximately 30 employees) with limited channel and service partners.

It needs to expand its appeal beyond technical buyers.