Social Software Gaining Greater Traction with the Enterprise and Vendors Respond

Forrester’s Rob Koplowitz writes that 2010 will be a defining year for enterprise 2.0 in his report, Enterprise Social Networking 2010 Market Overview. He goes on the writes that “a very broad and rich landscape of technology vendors will differentiate to stay relevant in this crowded market. With enterprise social technologies, buyers must now assess vendors pursuing three distinct strategies: commoditization, horizontal and vertical solutions, and integration with adjacent technologies.” I would add that vendors are creating very feature rich tools as the many of the more pure play offerings are now adding such additions as micro-blogging within their suite.

I was especially interested in his data on social media adoption through a survey of US and European KM decision makers. Rob found that in 2010 nearly one-third of enterprises will officially support internal and or external social networking.  In addition, wiki adoption will approach 50% in 2010 and they are the most popular tool. He found that the wikipedia model can enable a broad community to generate and maintain content. Another popular use case for wikis is as “a lightweight workspace and project management tool where teams can author content or coordinate activities and tasks with confidence that the information is up to date.”

The use cases for collaborative platforms were interesting. Collaboration on content (such as office documents was the top instance at 51%. Next was using a collaboration platform as a network fileshare at 48%. Then 39% of the respondents said they were integrating our collaboration platform’s calendaring, scheduling, and task management features with their email messaging system and 28% said they were using a collaboration platform’s Web 2.0 features such as blogs, Wikis, and RSS feeds, Finally 28% said they are using a collaboration platform to facilitate sharing of documents and other content with their external partners and customer and 20% are not using a collaborative platform.  

The report goes on to document how the vendors are responding to these trends. IBM Lotus and Microsoft attempting to extend their dominant positions in collaboration and messaging to social software. The many other venders are vendors pursuing “three distinct strategies: commoditization, horizontal and vertical solutions, and integration with adjacent technologies.” I have reviewed many of the venders sited include a number I have reviewed here and on the AppGap blog such as Atlassian, Box, Central Desktop, CubeTree, EMC, Jive, MindTouch, NewsGator, Novell, OpenText, PB Works, Socialtext, and Telligent.  The report can be found on the Forrester web site.