Research Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
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. © 2010 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates. This publication may not be reproduced or distributed in any form without Gartner's prior written permission. The information contained in this publication has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information and shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in such information. This publication consists of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice. Although Gartner research may include a discussion of related legal issues, Gartner does not provide legal advice or services and its research should not be construed or used as such. Gartner is a public company, and its shareholders may include firms and funds that have financial interests in entities covered in Gartner research. Gartner's Board of Directors may include senior managers of these firms or funds. Gartner research is produced independently by its research organization without input or influence from these firms, funds or their managers. For further information on the independence and integrity of Gartner research, see "Guiding Principles on Independence and Objectivity" on its website, http://www.gartner.com/technology/about/ombudsman/omb_guide2.jsp 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 Publication Date: 25 October 2010/ID Number: G00207256 Page 2 of 27 © 2010 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved. 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. Publication Date: 25 October 2010/ID Number: G00207256 Page 3 of 27 © 2010 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved. 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