August 24, 2011 The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Social Platforms, Q3 2011 by Rob Koplowitz for Content & Collaboration Professionals Making Leaders Successful Every Day For Content & Collaboration Professionals August 24, 2011 The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Social Platforms, Q3 2011 IBM, Jive, NewsGator, And Telligent Lead A Rapidly Maturing Field by Rob Koplowitz with Matthew Brown and Joseph Dang EXECUTIVE SUMMARY In Forrester’s first ever, 62-criteria evaluation of enterprise social platform vendors, we found that IBM, Jive, NewsGator, and Telligent led the pack due to breadth and depth of functionality and long-range strategy. Microsoft has added substantial social functionality to its SharePoint platform. Atlassian launched forward, broadening its core wiki offering, while Socialtext executed on its pioneering vision around capabilities like microblogging. Giants Cisco and OpenText are looking to get in on the action by extending their enterprise footprints. Content and collaboration professionals should use this report and associated spreadsheet tool as a starting point for evaluating how these vendors’ products fit with their particular requirements. taBLE OF CONTENts NOTES & RESOURCES 2 Collaboration And Innovation Goals Drive Forrester evaluated nine products and Social Technology Investments interviewed 18 user companies. Vendors Attack The Social Platform Market In Different Ways Related Research Documents “Leveraging Millennials To Drive Enterprise Social 3 Enterprise Social Platforms Evaluation Overview Initiatives” April 28, 2011 Evaluation Criteria Target Functionality And Vision “Integration: The Next Frontier For Enterprise Social” Evaluated Vendors Meet Comprehensive Features And Enterprise Traction Criteria April 18, 2011 6 Early Risks Pay Off And Drive Vendor Differentiation 8 Vendor Profiles Leaders Strong Performers Supplemental Material 11 © 2011 Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Forrester, Forrester Wave, RoleView, Technographics, TechRankings, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Reproduction or sharing of this content in any form without prior written permission is strictly prohibited. To purchase reprints of this document, please email clientsupport@ forrester.com. For additional reproduction and usage information, see Forrester’s Citation Policy located at www.forrester.com. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. 2 The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Social Platforms, Q3 2011 For Content & Collaboration Professionals COLLABoratioN AND INNovatioN goaLS DRIVE SOCIAL TECHNOLOGY INvestmeNts Strategic business goals like innovation, collaboration, and workforce productivity are behind a new breed of technology investment: enterprise social platforms. A whopping 64% of senior business leaders say that growing overall company revenue is their top priority in 2011. How do they intend to do it? More than half point to new customer acquisition; acquiring and retaining top talent ranks third on their list; and one in three look to improve overall customer relationships.1 As the economy continues its nascent recovery, these business priorities point to one clear truth: we live in the age of the customer and employee. Hundreds of Forrester inquiries in the past year suggest that these lofty business goals often trickle down to IT initiatives that use enterprise social technologies. In fact, Forrester’s technology adoption surveys point to a shift in software investment growth from more mature software categories — like enterprise resource planning (ERP), human capital management (HCM), and supply chain management (SCM) — to more people- or network- centric software. Consider that 37% of IT decision-makers plan to implement or expand the use of collaboration tools in 2011 compared with 25% or less who are planning investments in ERP, HCM, product life-cycle management (PLM), and SCM app categories. The client interest in social platforms is fueled by three factors: · The desire to capture and re-use knowledge. As corporate networks grow into digital landfills, Forrester’s clients are looking to apply mature content management ideas — like versioning and life-cycle management — to social communications. Ensuring that the right hand knows what the left is doing remains paramount as well. For example, a client in basic materials manufacturing recently told us the story of how plant staff who had previously never communicated are now sharing manufacturing recipe formulation best practices in their internal social communities. · The need to maintain human connections across a disparate workforce. Particularly in North America, remote and mobile work is becoming the norm as two-thirds of the workforce works remotely at least occasionally.2 Traveling for physical meetings is increasingly viewed as costly and negative for the environment. And quick access to expertise is top of many enterprises’ checklists. Social profiles and team workspaces, combined with regular global telepresence meetings are now the pillars of a highly effective collaboration strategy at one defense contractor Forrester works with. · The pressure to modernize systems to meet new workforce demands. Highly empowered, tech-savvy individuals are entering the workforce, joining the 40 million Gen Yers already in the workplace.3 With four or more years of Facebook etiquette, three-way calling attacks, and celebrity Twitter-stalking, these new workers are not inundated by media and social technologies; they demand and thrive in it. Enterprises that leverage these individuals have found success driving technology behavior change.4 Enabling the consumerization of social technologies is in the enterprise is the next step to supporting innovation and advocacy among employees.5 August 24, 2011 © 2011, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Social Platforms, Q3 2011 3 For Content & Collaboration Professionals Vendors Attack The Social Platform Market In Different Ways To narrow the field of participants, Forrester used a set of inclusion criteria that eliminated a number of more focused social technology offerings. Many of these remain highly relevant to the market landscape. Beyond the nine enterprise social platform vendors evaluated in this report, many others fill in market niches, including: · Focused social tool offerings. These vendors place a primary focus on specific areas of functionality, typically microblogging, activity streams, and profiles rather than broad platform functionality evaluated in the Forrester Wave. We will address this class of vendors, which includes Yammer and Socialcast (recently acquired by VMware) in upcoming research. Other vendors that have placed a premium on specific vertical or horizontal capabilities, like PBworks and Traction Software, will also be addressed in separate research. · Social technology extensions. Numerous vendors are adding social capabilities to existing products — like portals and applications. Vendors like Oracle with its WebCenter Suite, salesforce.com with Chatter, and Tibco with tibbr are increasingly relevant here. In the long term, they will likely be viable contenders in the core enterprise social platform market. · New entrants. Lastly, a number of highly viable vendors were not included because their social technology products have insufficient market presence and/or market awareness within Forrester and its client base. This list includes such vendors as Igloo, Moxie, and Saba. ENTERPRISE SOCIAL PLatFORMS EvaLUatioN Overview To assess the state of the enterprise social platforms market and see how the vendors stack up against each other, Forrester evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of top enterprise social platforms vendors. Evaluation Criteria Target Functionality And Vision Given the current market landscape, Forrester included Microsoft SharePoint, a broad content- centric collaboration offering, which is becoming increasingly relevant in the social landscape, as well as more pure-play enterprise social vendors. We evaluated vendor products against 62 criteria, which we grouped into three high-level buckets: · Current offering. To assess product strength, we evaluated each offering against seven groups of criteria: 1) core functionality; 2) language support; 3) architecture and administration; 4) monitoring and reporting; 5) security; 6) cross-platform support; and 7) Information Workplace readiness. · Strategy. We reviewed each vendor’s strategy, evaluating how well the vendor’s planned enhancements will position it for market leadership and whether or not the vendor has the financial resources to support that strategy. © 2011, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited August 24, 2011 4 The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Social Platforms, Q3 2011 For Content & Collaboration Professionals · Market presence. To determine a vendor’s market presence, we evaluated each vendor’s financial performance, installed base, integration partners, professional services, number of employees, and technology partners. Evaluated Vendors Meet Comprehensive Features And Enterprise Traction Criteria Forrester included nine vendors in the assessment: Atlassian, Cisco, IBM, Jive, Microsoft, NewsGator, OpenText, Socialtext, and Telligent. Each of these vendors (see Figure 1): · Offered a breadth of social capabilities. Participating vendors were required to have most or all of