E X C E R P T
W o r l d w i d e E n t e r p r i s e S o c i a l S o f t w a r e 2 0 1 2 V e n d o r
A n a l y s i s
Vanessa Thompson Amy Konary
Michael Fauscette
I N T H I S E X C E R P T
The content for this excerpt was taken directly from IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Enterprise Social Software 2012 Vendor Analysis (IDC Document #237336). All or parts of the following sections are included in this excerpt: IDC Opinion, Executive Summary, Situation Overview, Enterprise Social Software MarketScape, Future Outlook, Vendor Profile (Igloo Software), Essential Guidance and Learn More.
I D C O P I N I O N
The increasing sophistication of use cases demonstrates that the market for enterprise social software is maturing quickly. Organizations are looking to engage internal users and customers in an ongoing conversation, inside and outside the firewall. As usage increases in breadth and depth, activity streams, discussion forums, blogs, and wikis are becoming assumed functionality of enterprise social software to facilitate collaboration in real time and in context. Customers are demanding broader and more specific collaboration scenarios that tie together internal and external constituents, deliver sophisticated insight into user behavior on the network, and extend seamlessly across mobile form factors. This IDC study examines the key players in the worldwide enterprise social software market and analyzes their current capabilities as well as longer-term strategies that impact their ability to service customers and gain market share. Key criteria for enterprise social software solutions that contribute to customer success include:
Solution capabilities that extend activity streams, blogs, and wikis to offer a broader and more inclusive system to include external groups and secure communities
Optimized mobile user experience (UX), including an enhanced in-app experience across multiple devices
Native platform analytics that supersede basic reporting, offering the ability to extend data models to application partners and perform behavioral and predictive analysis on data generated by the network
A scalable and extensible platform that encourages customers and ISV partners to develop complementary solutions to extend the value of solutions for different roles, company sizes, and industries
3 3 Y o n g e S t. , S u it e 4 2 0 , Tor o n to , On ta rio C a n a d a , M5E 1 G4
Prepackaged integrations with collaboration tools and major enterprise application vendors delivered via the cloud as well as support for on-premise legacy enterprise application systems
E X E C U T I V E S U M M A R Y
As use cases of enterprise social software broaden and mature, organizations are looking to engage internal users and customers in an ongoing conversation, inside and outside the firewall. With this, activity streams, discussion forums, blogs, and wikis are becoming assumed functionality of enterprise social software to facilitate collaboration in real time and in context. Customers are demanding broader and more specific collaboration scenarios that tie together internal and external constituents to deliver sophisticated insight into user behavior on the network and extend seamlessly across mobile form factors.
This IDC study uses the IDC MarketScape model to examine key players in the worldwide enterprise social software market and analyze their current capabilities and longer-term strategies. The IDC MarketScape is a deep evaluation based on a comprehensive framework and a set of parameters that assess vendors relative to one another as well as on factors that IDC believes will impact vendors' ability to service customers and gain market share going forward.
S I T U A T I O N O V E R V I E W
Over the past few years, the broader social business landscape has seen sweeping changes in use cases, adoption, technology, and attitudes. Early use cases centered on leveraging external customer-facing social media to gain influence on and relevance to the emergent customer channel. During this time, the focus of social strategies tended to come from business areas, like marketing, that would spearhead initiatives to demonstrate influence in these new channels. Along with the maturity of "social" as a customer and engagement channel, use cases have grown into some broad categories that extend beyond marketing and support, namely customer experience, sales enablement, digital commerce, socialytics, innovation management, and enterprise social networks (ESNs). ESNs are becoming increasingly evident in organizations today as they represent a wider group of social applications that facilitate the connection of people inside and outside the firewall. The ESN provides a social collaboration or relationship layer in the business that can be a standalone enterprise social software solution or a set of applications tied together that coexist with other enterprise applications and collaborative technologies. ESNs provide a mechanism to find information and people through connecting people, data, and systems in an overarching system, thus creating a place in which to work collaboratively. Knowledge sharing is a core component of this, but it is also essential to facilitate collaboration in the context of business processes. These processes may directly support an enterprise application, but in some cases, processes are generated outside an enterprise application and require a business decision to move through the enterprise workflow. Organizations are now seeking solutions that not only support internal knowledge sharing and information dissemination but also build customers, partners, and suppliers into a more externally
focused and strategic decision-making process. As the influence of ESNs matures inside organizations, they need to support both tactical and strategic business processes and operations. Capturing the requested functionality and characteristics of corporate-sponsored enterprise social software provides cues into the pervasiveness of an ESN.
C u r r e n t S t a t e o f t h e E n t e r p r i s e S o c i a l S o f t w a r e M a r k e t
For several years, IDC has produced forecasts for enterprise social software (formerly social platforms). Based on year-over-year market growth of 39.8%, it is fair to say that organizations are much more comfortable in their basic understanding of the social Web and the use of social software in a business context. In addition, with 67% of organizations in IDC's May 2012 Social Business Survey having already implemented corporate-sponsored enterprise social software solutions, the basic functionality of solutions like activity streams, wikis, blogs, and discussion forums has now become assumed.
While most of the vendors in this market offer independent or standalone enterprise social software solutions, a number of vendors like Yammer, VMware (Socialcast), and salesforce.com (Chatter), have taken a service-oriented platform approach to enabling the ESN, with solutions being based upon APIs. This architecture allows solution capabilities to be surfaced inside any application. Embedding social processes in shared workspaces to manage and share documents, assign and coordinate tasks, and maintain other project and team content has also become a way to capture mindshare and presence on the periphery of the enterprise social software market. Cloud content collaboration solutions may provide up to 80% of the functionality found in enterprise social software solutions, with primary capabilities supporting content-specific collaboration.
IDC believes that enterprise social software will eventually become the backbone of the ESN for a number of reasons.
Internal knowledge sharing and the ability to ask questions have become assumed functionality as companies move from an external focus to bringing all constituents into the feedback process. Enterprise social software is now being targeted as a way to engage customers, partners, and employees in building a better product or service. Companies are now looking to solutions that may also involve lightweight task and workflow management to facilitate the distribution of this feedback. Task and workflow management was not an explicit criteria for solutions measured in this IDC MarketScape, but as solutions mature, users will increasingly request this functionality as a way to extend existing deployments, broadening the scope of enterprise social networks. Some vendors currently provide task and workflow management including an approvals process. As the need for companies to innovate and manage innovation in a new way arises, companies will focus on where social technologies can add value to the innovation process.
Over the course of 2011, the consumer social networking experience was also influenced by the impact of the proliferation of consumer mobile devices in the enterprise. Organizations are now beginning to extend current deployments, looking
to rich clients across all mobile form factors (particularly smartphones and tablets) as well as other collaboration functions like email, instant messaging (IM), presence, and audio and Web conferencing. As the device ecosystem of organizations continues to grow, a number of new concerns come to the fore around liability, privacy, and security. To this end, the focus of enterprise mobility strategies throughout 2011 was on building policies and procedures to secure the burgeoning device ecosystem. However, once enterprise mobility strategies are in place, new mobile applications are able to be deployed more easily. Extending a streamlined enterprise social software user experience across mobile form factors will enable end users to continue to collaborate in the context of work processes and across a number of device interfaces.
IDC expects to see more momentum in 2012 toward enterprise applications and other collaborative applications being upgraded to include social functionality or integrate with enterprise social software solutions in a complementary fashion. IDC also expects an increase in basic integrations to more established collaboration tools such as enterprise IM and presence platforms — and for these capabilities to increase in sophistication. Enterprise application providers, particularly those focused on ERP, human capital management (HCM), project life-cycle management (PLM), and content management, have the potential to disrupt the social vendor landscape by embedding social functionalities into all-new applications. Some vendors have already begun introducing a social layer to enterprise applications, though this is in early stages. Until more applications are inherently social, organizations will need to draw on enterprise social software solutions that have the capability to provide integrations with legacy applications and embed social into business processes. In addition to deploying enterprise social software for enhancing interactions among workers for productivity purposes, organizations are now leveraging the data generated by network interactions. Enterprise social solutions today should have the base capability of performing analysis on general network behavior to understand listeners, through log-in tracking and contributors, from a number of sources — namely number of comments, interactions, thread tracking, and @mentions. These core tools need to be in place to translate user and customer experiences into useable metrics.
As solutions mature, interactions occurring among employees, customers, partners, and/or suppliers, as well as within public and private social networking environments, should be captured and behavioral modeling applied to the data. Linking structures from the social Web and layering on classification schemes will add context to the funnel of data available and can provide insight into past, current, and future actions of these internal and external stakeholders. A number of enterprise social solution providers are now integrating or partnering with third-party vendors to enable discovery sharing, improving forecasting or creating visualizations, to provide insight into business decision making. IDC expects that as enterprise social networks become more pervasive inside organizations, indexing at the source of the social network will become increasingly important to users as the funnel of data gets larger and the data structures become increasingly complex.
Many organizations have made large-scale investments in unified communications (UC) platforms to support employee collaboration, including the combination of email, fax and voice messaging, called unified messaging (UM), IM, audio and Web conferencing, pervasive presence management, and awareness of mobile unified communications, among others. In this context, these tools will all be accessible through common user interfaces (UIs) on desktop and mobile devices but are being transcended by enterprise social software alternatives that can provide up to 80% of the UC platform functionality requested by organizations. With enterprise social software solutions having native communications tools embedded or with capabilities being available through partner solutions, the notion that enterprise social software can be used as a replacement to UC platforms is pertinent in an increasing number of cases.
Many vendors are making the barriers to use in this market very low with free trial or freemium offerings allowing user groups, networks, projects, or communities up to a certain size very little configuration work to get initial solutions up and running. In some cases, customers may have access to a full function solution, including desired features like active directory synchronization, that may be restricted to the paid version in a number of cases. In addition, the number of SaaS offerings and low-cost hybrid hosted solutions in the market also lowers the barriers of entry for small and midsize businesses.
The companies included in this IDC MarketScape provided a mix of pricing models, including subscription-based approaches and more traditional perpetual licenses options. While subscription is most often associated with cloud deployment, it is also offered as an option for many on-premise offerings. While not always the preferred approach in every case, subscription allows companies to adopt solutions such as enterprise social software more incrementally, at their own pace, with less risk if the customer's social strategy changes or if newer solutions become available that offer a broader range of desired functionality. It is especially important that enterprise social software providers offer a pricing approach that is easy to understand and transparent for customers. Flexibility is often a desired characteristic of a pricing approach, yet simplicity is also desired. Enterprise social software providers will need to balance their approach so that customers feel that they can buy in a way that makes sense for their specific use case, but also in a way that is not overly complex to understand (or that requires a sales rep to explain).
As adoption of enterprise social software increases, the sheer number of solutions in organizations also increases, with many companies having deployed more than one solution. Sustaining communities of users will become critical to retain engagement in solutions agnostic of features and functions. These companies will need to retain and integrate a variety of social solutions, standalone and embedded, where mission-critical business processes have passed into the ESN. At the same time, the market for social software has become highly fragmented, with many smaller more nimble providers emerging to meet immediate demands. Larger and more established collaboration providers will have a vested interest in protecting and growing current installed bases, but as the footprint of smaller providers grows, proprietary and interdependent architectures will need to give way to a more open and modular solution approach.
Creating an environment for users to work more collaboratively is the general goal of enterprise social software. Extending technology sets that support social processes can help organizations shape cultural and behavioral changes necessary for sustained adoption. Enterprise social software should contribute to increased productivity in organizations by connecting people, data, and systems in a single system and therefore facilitating ad hoc problem solving. As networks expand, the holy grail of enterprise social software is that serendipitous knowledge sharing will enable expert networks to extend beyond employee role specifications and toward near-asynchronous knowledge sharing.
I D C M a r k e t S c a p e V e n d o r I n c l u s i o n C r i t e r i a This IDC MarketScape focuses on vendors that provide enterprise social solutions that can act as standalone solutions, broader platform capabilities, or cloud content collaboration solutions that may encompass up to 80% of enterprise social software functionality.
M a r k e t S t r a t e g i e s
To succeed in the enterprise social software market, vendors must incorporate the criteria listed in Tables 1 and 2 when crafting a future strategy and in leveraging existing capabilities to their best advantage. The criteria were weighted because IDC believes that some are more important than others in maximizing market opportunity and realizing market success.
Tables 1 and 2 include market-specific definitions of criteria and associated weightings used to measure vendors' resulting placement on the IDC MarketScape. Table 1 lists definitions and weightings of characteristics considered key indicators for successful longer-term strategies. Table 2 lists definitions and weightings of characteristics considered key indicators for current and short-term strategies.
T A B L E 1
K e y S t r a t e g i e s M e a s u r e s f o r S u c c e s s f o r E n t e r p r i s e S o c i a l S o f t w a r e
Strategies Criteria Criteria for Success Subcritiera
Weighting
Strategy Offering The current development of offerings will be relevant and
attractive to customers over the next three to five years. Functionality or offering roadmap Excellence is marked by plans to offer a complete and
integrated suite either through organic development, partnership or acquisition.
2.50
Delivery model Excellence is marked by plans to grow the current customer base and/or attract new customers with customers' preferred delivery model whether on-premise, cloud services (public, private, and hybrid) or appliance. Excellence is also marked by plans to meet SLA requirements and/or product
enhancements such as upgrades, updates, or patches.
T A B L E 1
K e y S t r a t e g i e s M e a s u r e s f o r S u c c e s s f o r E n t e r p r i s e S o c i a l S o f t w a r e
Strategies Criteria Criteria for Success Subcritiera
Weighting Cost Management Excellence is marked by ways in which the vendor will help
clients justify expenditures by providing ROI models, volume discounting and clear use case scenarios in which the client can gain the most value for the investment.
0.50
Portfolio strategy Excellence is marked by plans to support and enhance the product by offering a portfolio of complementary solutions from the company or its ecosystem of partners.
2.00
Future Integration Strategy Excellence is marked by plans to integrate with common third-party systems (e.g. Enterprise Applications,
Collaborative Applications including other Enterprise Social Software, CRM, or Content Management Applications) resulting in more efficient business process exposure, data access and workflow.
2.50
Scalability Strategy Excellence is marked by plans to handle end-user demands for additional capabilities and maintain application
performance when end-users are added to the system.
2.00
Strategy Offering total 10.00
Strategy - Go to Market Go-to-market strategies maximize the connection between
offerings and customers, including choosing to target customer segments that offer the greatest opportunity over the next three to five years.
Pricing model Excellence is marked by planning for future pricing alignment with market direction and budgets that will encourage adoption of the enterprise social software product.
2.00
Sales/distribution channel strategy Excellence is demonstrated by plans to increase the breadth of channels to go to market including regions, industries, and/or adjacent markets.
2.50
Marketing strategy Excellence is marked by plans that will leverage a variety of marketing methods and tactics to generate awareness and buzz with special emphasis placed on savvy use of social media and Web 2.0 concepts to generate leads.
1.00
Customer Service strategy Excellence is marked by plans to retain customers by incorporating not only traditional service and support methods, but also using social CRM and social media principles/strategies.
4.50
Strategy - Go to Market total 10.00
T A B L E 1
K e y S t r a t e g i e s M e a s u r e s f o r S u c c e s s f o r E n t e r p r i s e S o c i a l S o f t w a r e
Strategies Criteria Criteria for Success Subcritiera
Weighting trends and future opportunities over the next three to five
years.
Growth Strategy Excellence is marked by Management's planned growth formula that aligns with the market trends IDC anticipates over the next 3 to 5 years.
4.00
Innovation/R&D pace and productivity
Excellence is marked by plans to advance product functionality according to the needs of its customers, partners and the overall market as well as the anticipated speed in which it will be accomplished.
3.00
Financial/funding model Excellence is marked by plans for public companies to grow new licenses. Excellence is also marked by plans for private companies to increase funding and/or bootstrapping, become profitable (and if profitable, grow profitability), and/or have firm IPO plans.
2.00
Employee strategy Excellence is marked by plans for acquiring and retaining top talent.
1.00
Strategy Business total 10.00
Source: IDC, 2012
T A B L E 2
K e y C a p a b i l i t i e s M e a s u r e s f o r S u c c e s s f o r E n t e r p r i s e S o c i a l S o f t w a r e
Capabilities Criteria Criteria for Success Subcritiera
Weighting
Capabilities Offering The offering's capabilities align well with current market
needs and demands.
Functionality/offering delivered The ideal solution embraces Web 2.0 principles through a simple user interface (UI) and intuitive user experience (UX). The solution offers all of the functions natively without partnerships and fully integrated on a single database and underlying architecture; certain functionality components can be marketed and sold as a standalone offering.
3.00
Delivery model appropriateness & execution
The solution offers customers their preferred delivery model whether on-premise, cloud services (public, private, and hybrid) or appliance. The solution meets customers' expectations in terms of SLA requirements and timeliness of product enhancements such as upgrades, updates, or
T A B L E 2
K e y C a p a b i l i t i e s M e a s u r e s f o r S u c c e s s f o r E n t e r p r i s e S o c i a l S o f t w a r e
Capabilities Criteria Criteria for Success Subcritiera
Weighting patches.
Cost competitiveness The solution pricing aligns with current enterprise social software price bands and includes tiered pricing based on volume/number of users and/or levels of functionality offered.
1.00
Portfolio benefits delivered The solution has multiple functionality components that are sold primarily as a broad based solution, but can also be sold as individual components depending on customer need. In either situation, the broad based solution or individual components can be enhanced by complementary solutions offered by an ecosystem of technology and service partners.
2.00
Integration The solution has integrations with common third-party systems (e.g. Enterprise Applications, Collaborative Applications including other Enterprise Social Software, CRM, or Content Management Applications) to automate workflows and provide further contextual collaboration. For those products sold as individual components, seamless process flow and data exchange must be evident between modules.
2.00
Scalability The solution has minimal performance downtime and latency; end-users can be added to the system without disruption.
1.00
Capabilities Offering total 10.00
Capabilities Go To Market Go-to-market capabilities maximize the connection between
offerings and customers, such as delivery, partnerships, pricing, distribution, marketing, sales, and service. Pricing model options & alignment The solution has an appropriate pricing schema that
correlates to how the solution will be used by customers (e.g. named users, concurrent users or a particular usage metric) as well as billing method based on customer preference (e.g. up front, monthly, quarterly or yearly); implementation fees collected should be determined reasonable for the work required.
3.00
Sales/distribution channel structure, capabilities
The solution is effectively being sold via direct, indirect and online models (e.g. freemium). In a direct model, the sales team understands and communicates the value proposition articulately and can position appropriately alongside other non-enterprise social solutions (if offered by the company). In an indirect model, the company has a clearly articulated and mature partnering strategy and a strong ecosystem of technology and service partners specifically for the enterprise social software solution. For companies that
T A B L E 2
K e y C a p a b i l i t i e s M e a s u r e s f o r S u c c e s s f o r E n t e r p r i s e S o c i a l S o f t w a r e
Capabilities Criteria Criteria for Success Subcritiera
Weighting employ a freemium model to their sales/distribution strategy,
customer traction and conversion rates to paying customers must be demonstrated.
Marketing The solution is marketed to targeted audiences with an easily understood and concise message that demonstrates the value proposition and designated use case(s). A variety of marketing methods and tactics should be employed to generate awareness and buzz with special emphasis placed on savvy use of social media and Web 2.0 concepts to generate leads.
1.00
Customer Service The solution is regarding highly among clients; the feedback received is characterized by high client satisfaction and customer retention. From a company standpoint, the firm is considered easy to work with, open to customer feedback and resolves issues quickly through traditional and social channels.
3.00
Capabilities Go To Market total 10.00
Capabilities Business Financial, employee, partner, and R&D management,
among other capabilities, are in agreement with current market opportunities.
Growth strategy execution The company demonstrates new client acquisition across target markets. Growth will be determined by the percentage increase of customers acquired in calendar years 2009-2011.
4.00
Innovation/R&D pace and productivity
The company dedicates research and development resources towards improving existing functionality and creating new capabilities to compete effectively against competitors and which resonates with key stakeholders such as customer and partners.
4.00
Financial/funding management The company demonstrates executive-level commitment and financial support to improve product capabilities as well as generate market awareness and sales momentum to meet goals. For private companies, this also includes raising sufficient investment funds or bootstrapping efforts to fuel company growth.
1.00
Employee management The company shows the ability to recruit, obtain and retain top talent.
1.00
Capabilities Business total 10.00
F U T U R E O U T L O O K
I D C M a r k e t S c a p e : E n t e r p r i s e S o c i a l S o f t w a r e M a r k e t V e n d o r A s s e s s m e n t
The IDC vendor assessment for the enterprise social software market represents IDC's opinion on which vendors are well positioned today through current capabilities and which are best positioned to gain market share over the next few years.
Positioning in the upper right of the grid indicates that vendors are well positioned to gain market share. For the purposes of discussion, IDC divided potential key strategy measures for success into two primary categories: capabilities and strategies. Positioning on the y-axis reflects the vendor's current capabilities and menu of services and how well aligned it is to customer needs. The capabilities category focuses on the capabilities of the company and the product today. Under this category, IDC analysts look at how well a vendor is building/delivering capabilities that enable it to execute its chosen strategy in the market.
Positioning on the x-axis or strategies axis indicates how well the vendor's future strategy aligns with what customers will require in three to five years. The strategies category focuses on high-level strategic decisions and underlying assumptions about offerings, customer segments, and business and go-to-market plans for the future, in this case defined as the next three to five years. Under this category, analysts look at whether or not a supplier's strategies in various areas are aligned with customer requirements (and spending) over a defined future time period.
Figure 1 shows each vendor's position in the vendor assessment chart. The vendor's market share is indicated by the size of the bubble, and a (+), (-), or () icon indicates whether or not the vendor is growing faster than, slower than, or even with, respectively, overall market growth.
F I G U R E 1 I D C M a r k e t S c a p e E n t e r p r i s e S o c i a l S o f t w a r e V e n d o r A s s e s s m e n t Source: IDC, 2012
V E N D O R P R O F I L E
I g l o o S o f t w a r eIgloo Software is headquartered in Canada but has always had an international presence. The company was originally established in 2004 as an online network to facilitate and promote knowledge exchange among those working, studying, or advising on global issues. Today, the company's product focus has evolved to communities for internal and external collaboration, with data governance and compliance controls built into the product.
Igloo provides single- and multitenant SaaS offerings, with the single-tenant offering primarily servicing larger clients. Hosting and managed services are provided by Savvis, and uptime is publicly available, published monthly to the company Web site. The company uses an inside sales model, and customer support is serviced via a
help desk and social media channels wherever possible. This is facilitated though an integrated CRM system that incorporates customer service and issue tracking. Igloo follows an agile development cycle delivering new product releases every 90 days and offers a customer support center with updates to the product road map communicated directly via the portal; new release preview sites are also available. The company notes that multilingual content translation and social analytics are two of the latest capabilities to be released, and 50% of each release is based upon customer feedback.
User-based controls make community configuration simple and enable task-driven team activities to be surfaced in personalized user dashboards. Secure file sharing and content moderation are core capabilities for the company, with approval workflow built into all content distribution. The company also plans to offer secure IM and social task management by the end of this year.
Igloo is a Major Player in this analysis, with the company continuing to focus on providing open and transparent customer feedback channels as well as professional services and training. Based on customer feedback from IDC's Enterprise Social Software MarketScape Survey, Igloo had the best overall solution capability rating from respondents. IDC believes that the customer success value proposition is a strong suit for the company, but mandating certified application integration via its REST-based API may dis-incentivize third-party application development required for the company to gain broader solution adoption.
E S S E N T I A L G U I D A N C E
Advice for Buyers At a minimum, enterprise social software should contribute to increased productivity by connecting people, data, and systems to facilitate ad hoc problem solving.
As networks expand, serendipitous knowledge sharing provides an opportunity to learn from community feedback and enables expert networks to extend beyond employee role specifications.
Adoption of a solution cannot be achieved by simply deploying a tool. It requires the support of solution champions and community management as well as an active technical support community provided by the vendor.
Eventually, social capabilities should be embedded across the application portfolio. Planning how to integrate current enterprise social tools with each other and then how the broader social strategy supports mission-critical applications will help the plan support applications that are social rather than a set of social applications.
Igloo had the best overall solution capability rating from respondents.
L E A R N M O R E
M e t h o d o l o g yIDC MarketScape criteria selection, weightings, and vendor scores represent well researched IDC judgment of the market and specific vendors. IDC analysts tailor the range of standard characteristics by which vendors are measured through structured discussions, surveys, and interviews with market leaders, participants, and end users. Market weightings are based on user interviews, buyer surveys, and the input of a review board of IDC experts in each market. IDC analysts base individual vendor scores, and ultimately vendor positions on the IDC MarketScape, on detailed surveys and interviews with the vendors and customers, publicly available information, and an analysis of end-user experiences in an effort to provide an accurate and consistent assessment of each vendor's characteristics, behavior, and capability.
E n t e r p r i s e S o c i a l S o f t w a r e D e f i n i t i o n
To evaluate the market for enterprise social software, it is important to define the market and discuss key trends and drivers. Enterprise social software offerings bring enhanced social collaboration capabilities to users that are either inside or outside an organization's firewall. Primary users perform non–customer-facing roles, but customer-facing interactions may also occur. Common Enterprise 2.0 functionality is offered in enterprise social software solutions and includes but is not limited to activity streams, blogs, communities, discussion forums, groups (public or private), ideas, microblogging, profiles, recommendation engines (content or people), tagging, bookmarking, and wikis. Vendors in the enterprise social software market can offer discrete solutions supporting one type of social functionality (such as community management, ideation, innovation management, or activity streams) or a broad-based platform that encompasses many functionality traits. A variety of deployment options (on-premise, SaaS, hosted application management, or software appliance) are made available.
C o p y r i g h t N o t i c e
This IDC research document was published as part of an IDC continuous intelligence service, providing written research, analyst interactions, telebriefings, and conferences. Visit www.idc.com to learn more about IDC subscription and consulting services. To view a list of IDC offices worldwide, visit www.idc.com/offices. Please contact the IDC Hotline at 800.343.4952, ext. 7988 (or +1.508.988.7988) or [email protected] for information on applying the price of this document toward the purchase of an IDC service or for information on additional copies or Web rights. Copyright 2012 IDC. Reproduction is forbidden unless authorized. All rights reserved.
