The Aragon Research Globe™ for Social Software, 2014: Getting Down to Business
Authors: Jim Lundy, David Mario Smith
Date: June 25, 2014
Topic: Social Software
Research Note Number: 2014-23
Issue: Who are the social software providers and how will they evolve?
Summary: The Aragon Research Globe™ for social software evaluates 20 providers from varying backgrounds. Business and IT leaders responsible for social software implementations should use this Globe to rationalize vendor offerings for procurement decisions and match capabilities to business use cases.
Table of Contents
Introduction
The Shift to Social Business
ESNs and Mobile
Aragon Research Globe Overview
Dimensions of Analysis
The Four Sectors of the Globe
Inclusion Criteria
Exclusions
New Additions
The Aragon Research Globe™ for Social Software, 2014
Leaders
Contenders
Innovators
Specialists
Aragon Advisory
Bottom Line
[wlm_loginform] [private_Provisor level]
Introduction
While social software is maturing from a technology perspective, business and IT leaders are still struggling to match the right business use cases to ensure optimal adoption. Increasingly, social is becoming more contextual and the applications are adding more functionality, either directly in a business application or via third-party app plug-ins providing a social layer.
The rallying cry for social in recent years has been to center it on business initiatives. These social business offerings attempt to bring more social context into business processes. Increasingly they are adding real-time collaboration capabilities along with the present activity streams to enhance contextual collaborative decision making in real-time. The concept of presence is tied to the profile, which allows single-click access to multiple communication modes for collaborative interaction from within the social environment.
Enterprise social software isn’t new, but while many firms have had an ESN deployed for a while, just as many are still trying to figure out how to get started. ESN offerings have matured and are more collaborative: the activity feed isn’t as front and center, and in many cases it is more contextual.
Many enterprises have deployed a social network, but even more are still on the sidelines looking to start a pilot. The players in the market are evolving too. In this second Aragon Research Globe we evaluate the providers in the enterprise social software market.
The big shift in enterprise social networking (ESN) is the shift to social business applications. What is happening overall in software is also reflective of what is happening in collaboration. ESNs are becoming more contextual – and in some cases more integrated into key business processes.
As a result, ESNs are becoming more of a collaboration platform than a separate, isolated tool. Content has become much easier to integrate and activity feeds for many offerings have become far more contextual.
The ability of social applications to integrate with existing applications is the way forward. Many are doing this with a combination of approaches. Some are adding native integrations with their existing products. Others add integrations with third-party apps via a store or app exchange integration.
There are still many pathways to working socially. The last two years have taught us that one size does not fit all. This has become more apparent with social network integration into human capital management (Social HCM) and customer relationship management (Social CRM or SCRM).
In ESNs, the core organizing principle is still the group – a unit of organization that people can work in, and which common interests, activities or objectives serve to unify. Groups can come in many flavors and sizes, but their key characteristic is that instead of enabling just one activity, ESNs allow people to do multiple types of things that all involve, engage and benefit the group. Have a meeting, discuss a project, or assign tasks: these activities can all happen in a group.
The contextual group and the contextual activity feed are some of the things that are new. For example, creating a course may automatically add the students to a Social Learning Group. Collaborating around a deal in a Social Selling Group is another example.
ESNs and Mobile
Mobile capabilities still vary across providers. One indicator of mobile focus is frequency of application update. Generally, providers that have focused teams on their mobile apps update them frequently. This is partially to keep adding functionality, as well as to keep up with updates to the mobile operating systems, such as iOS, Android and Windows Phone.
A key consideration when evaluating any provider is to look closely at its mobile functionality. If your mobile collaboration solution is going to be used by people in the field, look for apps that offer full social collaboration capabilities. On top of that, being able to access content on the mobile ESN app is critical, since more and more people will be accessing their work via a mobile device.
Aragon Research Globe Overview
The Aragon Research Globe graphically represents our analysis of a specific market and its component vendors. We do a rigorous analysis of each vendor, using three dimensions that enable comparative evaluation of the participants in a given market.
The Aragon Research Globe looks beyond size and market share, which often dominate this type of analysis, and instead uses those as comparative factors in evaluating providers’ product-oriented capabilities. Positioning in the Globe will reflect how complete a provider’s future strategy is, relative to their performance in fulfilling that strategy in the market.
A further differentiating factor is the global market reach of each vendor. This allows all vendors with similar strategy and performance to be compared regardless of their size and market share. It will improve recognition of providers with a comprehensive strategy and strong performance but limited or targeted global penetration, which will be compared more directly to others with similar perspectives.
Dimensions of Analysis
The following parameters are tracked in this analysis:
Strategy reflects the degree to which a vendor has the market understanding and strategic intent that are at the forefront of market direction. That includes providing the capabilities that customers want in the current offering and recognizing where the market is headed.The strategy evaluation includes:
- Product
- Product strategy
- Market understanding and how well product roadmaps reflect that understanding
- Marketing
- Management team, including time in the job and understanding of the market
Performance represents a vendor’s effectiveness in executing its defined strategy. This includes selling and supporting the defined product offering or service. The performance evaluation includes:
- Awareness: Market awareness of the firm and its product.
- Customer experience: Feedback on the product, installs, upgrades and overall satisfaction.
- Viability: Financial viability of the provider as measured by financial statements.
- Pricing and Packaging: Is the offering priced and packaged competitively?
- Product: The mix of features tied to the frequency and quality of releases and updates.
- R&D: Investment in research and development as evidenced by overall architecture.
Reach is a measure of the global capability that a vendor can deliver. Reach can have one of three values: national, international or global. Being able to offer products and services in one of the following three regions is the third dimension of the Globe analysis:
- Americas (North America and Latin America)
- EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa)
- APAC (Asia Pacific: including but not limited to Australia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Russia, Singapore, etc.)
The market reach evaluation includes:
- Sales and support offices worldwide
- Time zone and location of support centers
- Support for languages
- References in respective hemispheres
- Data center locations
The Four Sectors of the Globe
The Globe is segmented into four sectors, representing high and low in both the strategy and performance dimensions. When the analysis is complete, each vendor will be in one of four groups: leaders, contenders, innovators or specialists. We define these as follows:
- Leaders have comprehensive strategies that align with industry direction and market demand, and effectively perform against those strategies.
- Contenders have strong performance, but more limited or less complete strategies. Their performance positions them well to challenge for leadership by expanding their strategic focus.
- Innovators have strong strategic understanding and objectives, but have yet to perform effectively across all elements of that strategy.
- Specialists fulfill their strategy well, but have a narrower or more targeted emphasis with regard to overall industry and user expectations. Specialists may excel in a certain market or vertical application.
Inclusion Criteria
Enterprise social networks often become the hub of an organization, where work gets done and information is stored and accessed. An ESN is different from a social layer, where just activity streams are shared.
The inclusion criteria for this Aragon Research Globe are:
- A minimum of $5 million of primary revenue for social software or $15 million in a related market (collaboration, content management or portal/UX software).
- Shipping product: Product must be announced and available.
- Customer references: Vendor must provide at least three customer references in each region where it does business.
Exclusions
The following vendors were excluded from this Aragon Research Globe:
Cisco–
- Cisco WebEx Social (formerly Cisco Quad) has been on the market since 2010. Cisco has been excluded from this evaluation because it has ceased ongoing production of WebEx Social and has recently partnered with Jive Software to integrate its social capabilities (see Cisco Partners With Jive For ESN, Drops WebEx Social).
MindTouch–
- MindTouch is a leading provider of customer support and knowledgebase solutions. Their product has shifted away from social business, but they remain a force in providing a leading way for companies to support their products and services.
MoxieSoft–
- Moxie added a new CEO, Rebecca Ward, and has shifted toward a complete focus on customer support and knowledgebase solution area.
ThoughtFarmer – did not meet minimum participation criteria.
XWiki – did not meet the minimum participation criteria.
New Additions
The following vendors have been added since our 2012 Globe was published:
- Bloomfire
- Mzinga
- Oracle (Oracle Social Network)
- TIBCO(tibbr)
Figure 1: The Aragon Research Globe™ for Social Software, 2014
Leaders
| Huddle | ||
| Huddle has clearly shifted into collaboration, having initially focused on content sharing as an alternative to SharePoint. Huddle today is about being productive at work as well as with external activities. It allows users to work and collaborate on tablets. Huddle has also set the standard around predictive content, since it can recognize usage patterns and have the content that the user will most likely need synced and available on the tablet. The future of work is all about predictive applications and Huddle has jumped ahead of others with this capability.Huddle has been pushing the envelope in collaboration since its founding, and it is now focused on growth in Europe and North America. Huddle users frequently comment that it helps them get their work done wherever they happen to be. We have seen large enterprises deploy Huddle in SharePoint accounts to enable work on mobile devices, such as iPads. | ||
|
Strengths |
Challenges |
|
|
|
|
| IBM (Connections) | ||
| IBM has been expanding its focus on social business, particularly with regard to Smarter Workforce and the cloud. It has branded all of its collaboration offerings, including social, under its Connections brand. IBM Connections is cloud-enabled and fully integrated with most of the IBM software product family, particularly the content management products. This makes Connections one of the stronger offerings when it comes to managing social content. IBM is leveraging Connections across its software portfolio, including its social HCM (Kenexa) product line, which now offers video collaboration. With its growing set of partner apps, Connections can be configured to meet multiple business user needs. This will help to simplify IBM’s broad portfolio for buyers interested in broader collaboration and social business capabilities.As others embrace social analytics, we note that IBM has also had social analytics for several years, now as part of its SmartCloud offering. IBM offers on-premises and cloud options and also an option for Hybrid Cloud, which is proving to be more popular in regulated industries. | ||
| Strengths | Challenges | |
|
|
|
| Jive Software | ||
| Jive continues to be a leader in the ESN market with execution that few have been able to match. As a public company, it has shown that it can execute on a consistent basis. Jive’s product has evolved with the acquisitions of meetings.io and Producteev to add real-time collaboration and business tasks capabilities respectively to its social platform. These moves signify a convergence in this space to add fuller collaboration capabilities that can integrate with business processes and applications.Jive was one of the first to introduce an app market that enabled the integration of other systems and solutions through the creation of apps that fully integrate with Jive’s social graph and collaborative workflow (via the OpenSocial protocol). Jive is also expanding its partner network and recently announced that Cisco and its partners will resell Jive. This helps jive with real-time collaboration as well as distribution. | ||
| Strengths | Challenges | |
|
|
|
| Microsoft (Yammer) | ||
| Microsoft bought Yammer in 2012 and since then it has been leveraging the Yammer ESN as its main offering for enterprise social capabilities. It has fully integrated Yammer into Office 365 and it has also been speeding up its releases. At the SharePoint 2014 Conference Microsoft announced that there would only be one more release of on-premises SharePoint features. Microsoft also announced the Social Graph as part of Office 365, and it made collaboration inside of Office 365 applications contextual.While Yammer has always had a mobile app, the experience on mobile devices has been secondary. The new Yammer client goes further, and we see more of a renewed focus on mobile from Microsoft. It is clear that Microsoft is all in on the cloud and Yammer continues to be its flagship offering for social collaboration. | ||
| Strengths | Challenges | |
|
|
|
| SAP (Jam) | ||
| SAP Jam has been evolving ever since the SAP team took over responsibility for that product line. In the past 12-18 months, the product has been revamped with improved functionality, allowing users to collaborate directly in Jam or in business applications while maintaining context. This represents the move we have been seeing and writing about, which is the shift toward social integrated with and in the context of business applications and processes.With more than 15M users, SAP Jam is one of the growing choices enterprises can look at, in part because so many enterprises already have SAP. SAP Jam now integrates with Microsoft SharePoint and Outlook, which we believe is necessary because of the penetration of both applications in enterprises. While SAP Jam supports all departments (HR, sales, service, marketing, supply chain, etc.) and is used as a sociallayer for SAP-specific applications, it also serves many customers using other enterprise solutions beyond SAP, including SugarCRM, Alfresco, Bunchball, etc. | ||
| Strengths | Challenges | |
|
|
|
| Sitrion (formerly Newsgator) | ||
| Newsgator changed its name to Sitrion in January of 2014 after acquiring Sitrion in October of 2013. For many years and even today, Sitrion has been and remains the dominant social app for Microsoft SharePoint. That said, it has been shifting its strategy since Microsoft acquired Yammer in 2012. A large majority of their install base is on-premises, since that is where SharePoint lives.The Newsgator installed base is still tied to the SharePoint platform, which is an advantage for Sitrion since ESNs need to tie into content so often. The Sitrion platform offers all the collaboration capabilities that an enterprise would want. While it added Innovative features in 2013, we don’t see that as being its main attraction. Sitrion’s product strategy extends well beyond social collaboration. The company is focused on what the employee needs to get work done providing unified experience working with backend processes like SAP and sharing and collaborating in the SharePoint environment. Sitrion is also focusing more on mobile work applications, which should benefit enterprises with mobilized workforces. | ||
| Strengths | Challenges | |
|
|
|
| TIBCO (tibbr) | ||
| TIBCO’s social offering, tibbr, is an easy-to-use ESN that lets users collaborate and do work on any device. tibbr has been growing in popularity, partly due to its increased functionality in the areas of file management, meeting planning, task management, content creation and ideation. Increased application integrations, such as SharePoint, Salesforce and NetSuite evolve tibbr from a pure activity stream to a collaborative work platform.TIBCO wants tibbr to be the enterprise’s connective tissue: the integration point and workspace that all information, data and activity feeds into. It also becomes an ecosystem of integrated partner applications from real-time collaboration to business apps such as CRM. TIBCO makes tibbr available via multiple channels based on buyer preferences. | ||
|
Strengths |
Challenges |
|
|
|
|
Contenders
| Liferay | ||
| Liferay is an open-source portal server with web content management, workflow and social collaboration services included within a single lightweight download. Liferay now positions itself as an open-source social workplace alternative to Microsoft SharePoint, which it calls Liferay Social Office.Many enterprises leverage Liferay’s capabilities to build a wide array of web sites and web applications including internal and external websites and portals for customers, partners and employees. Liferay indicated that its forthcoming marketplace would provide out-of-the-box functionality. | ||
| Strengths | Challenges | |
|
|
|
| Salesforce | ||
| Chatter used to be the lead story for Salesforce, but mixed usage in the Salesforce installed base has led to a reduced focus on Chatter. While Salesforce has expanded its offering to include Communities, it has moved its marketing message to the mobile arena. Aragon has seen continued attempts to make Chatter more usable. Despite the fact that Salesforce includes Chatter with every sale of its core sales cloud platform, usage in accounts has been mixed.Today Salesforce is focused more on mobile than on social. That said, the spring 2014 release of the Salesforce1 platform includes more features that make Chatter more streamlined. Salesforce Chatter is still more dependent on activities than on collaboration, which can make for a suboptimal experience in the main activity feed. Salesforce has also renamed is file sharing service Chatterbox to Salesforce Files. It remains to be seen if users will want to Salesforce as their content repository. | ||
| Strengths | Challenges | |
|
|
|
Innovators
| Bloomfire | ||
| Bloomfire offers an easy-to-use knowledge and collaboration capability focused on content creation and sharing. Bloomfire has been growing, with new clients that generally fall into the mid-market space.The mobile-optimized Bloomfire product also offers the ability to create and share multimedia and interactive content such as HD video, with native webcam and screen casting capabilities. It supports employee onboarding and training, sales and marketing enablement, and customer support use cases with its support for sharing, expertise location and overall knowledge management.While Bloomfire has replaced most of its management team, the growing popularity of its offering has not suffered. The company continues to deliver on its vision to put “collaboration in the flow of work” with integrations to Salesforce, LinkedIn and Google Apps as well as leading file share solutions like Box, Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive. | ||
| Strengths | Challenges | |
|
|
|
| Mindjet(Spigit) | ||
| Spigit is now part of Mindjet. Mindjet, also known for its visual brainstorming productivity and collaboration suite, MindManager, has now added cloud-based enterprise innovation software to its portfolio. Mindjet SpigitEngage has continued to push the envelope in social innovation and innovation management. SpigitEngage focuses on making innovation a repeatable business process and has attracted many innovative Fortune 100 customers. It drives social innovation by enabling the capture, collaborative refinement, ranking and execution of ideas from employees, customers, partners and prospects. SpigitEngage has been pivotal in defining the space around crowdsourced idea management, crowd science and innovation.Spigit is cloud-based, which we believe will allow it to reduce the barrier to entry for organizations and aid in its penetration. To broaden its appeal and go beyond innovation programs, it has added machine learning to allow the solution to make recommendations in the innovation process, and introduced Mindjet Graph APIs to provide access to core innovation concepts so that innovation can be integrated contextually into business process applications. | ||
| Strengths | Challenges | |
|
|
|
| Mzinga | ||
| Mzinga, a pioneer in cloud-based e-learning, jumped on social learning earlier than any other vendors. Its cloud-based OmniSocial Learning platform competes in both large and small enterprises for enterprise learning. In cases where there is a business requirement for participation by an external audience in the ESN (agents, partners, customers, etc.), Mzinga’s flexible “experiences” functionality allows organizations to provide the right level of networking to various audiences. Mzinga also offers Mzinga OmniSocial Engaged, its social collaboration platform for external communities. Some large brands use Engaged, which excels in use cases such as brand affinity and customer support. Mzinga also excels at community moderation, which often is one of the critical success factors when launching a customer-focused community. | ||
| Strengths | Challenges | |
|
|
|
| Oracle | ||
| Oracle Social Network (OSN), part of the Oracle Cloud platform, is being included for full enterprise use with Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM), Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Oracle Customer Relationship Management (CRM).Oracle has a long history of organic development of collaboration capabilities, and OSN’s strength comes from its ease of use and the contextual way in which people can collaborate around a topic, customer engagement or other work-related task.Oracle positions OSN as the way business users want to buy and use collaborative applications, in the context of business processes. The approach of allowing people to collaborate in the context of work is a major tenet of social business. OSN, however, is focused on specific Oracle business applications. One thing that stands out is the OSN mobile app. It works well and it is widely used by clients. | ||
| Strengths | Challenges | |
|
|
|
| Saba | ||
| Saba is a social talent management provider that has been in collaboration for over 10 years and was one of the first to launch a social learning product. Saba’s offering, called Saba Cloud, combines real-time collaboration, such as low-bandwidth online meetings, virtual classroom and webinar capabilities integrated in a single unified platform, with end-to-end social capabilities that go beyond an activity stream. Saba’s social collaboration is woven into the context of talent management within learning, recruiting, succession, workforce planning and performance. Saba Cloud also provides employee engagement through peer-to-peer feedback using social impressions, badges and gamification.Saba has also added patent-pending predictive learning functionality via its TIM application. This also represents the way forward for business applications to become more predictive. Saba’s customer base is mainly on-premises, and it is in the process of migrating customers to the Saba Cloud. Lastly, an often-underplayed capability of the Saba Cloud is its full e-commerce platform. | ||
| Strengths | Challenges | |
|
|
|
| SocialText | ||
| SocialText, an early pioneer in wikis and enterprise social networks, has been expanding its functionality with the addition of video content into its platform via the KZO technology. SocialText’s parent company, Bedford Funding, has been leveraging the SocialText platform with its integration with the PeopleFluent social HCM platform. These solutions together represent a convergence in the overall market, merging social capabilities with video content management and HCM, which together represent a social business offering.Built around people, not HR processes, PeopleFluent¹s Mirror Suite integrates innovative video and social technologies into all talent applications. The system delivers a deeply personalized and collaborative experience that drives talent engagement and improved business performance. While it is early in the transition to make this integration fully realized a number of large PeopleFluent customers are adopting the Mirror and it signals the way forward for SocialText. The PeopleFluent distribution channel represents a growth opportunity for SocialText. | ||
| Strengths | Challenges | |
|
|
|
| Zimbra (formerly Telligent) | ||
| In July 2013, Telligent acquired the Zimbra assets from VMWare. The new brand will now be called Zimbra. The new Zimbra/Telligent offering will include email as a primary interface for surfacing social interactions such as activity streams. VMWare gave up on integrating Zimbra with SocialCast. Zimbra/Telligent will need to overcome some of the integration challenges to be successful. But email gives Zimbra/Telligent a differentiator compared to other unified social collaboration vendors.One of the major issues with enterprise social offerings has been limitation in their integration with email, which is where many enterprise workers live throughout their day. The Zimbra/Telligent social platform supports both internal and external social communities. Email integration not just with Zimbra, but also with others such as Microsoft Exchange/Outlook will be key. | ||
| Strengths | Challenges | |
|
|
|
Specialists
| blueKiwi (an Atos Company) | ||
| blueKiwi (an Atos Company), continues to push the envelope in social collaboration, but mainly in Europe. blueKiwi offers a SaaS-based ESN that enables ideation, communication and collaboration for internal and external communities. It has built much of its interaction around activity streams, and provides the ability to create summaries and easily collaborate in real time around projects and activities.blueKiwi has added more predictive recommendation and mobile app functionality, such as iPhone (in addition to iPad). Clients would benefit from more regular updates to the mobile apps. Additionally, blueKiwi has had success with its Atos Zero Email™ initiative. | ||
|
Strengths |
Challenges |
|
|
|
|
| Broadvision (Clearvale) | ||
| The Broadvision Clearvale social collaboration offering is now integrated into the full Broadvision 9 engagement platform and suite. Clearvale has a good community architecture that supports community networks for customers, partners and employees. With a new release in January 2014, Broadvision positioned Clearvale as a platform for building social collaboration ecosystems that span internal and external communities and enterprise use cases.Clearvale provides a broad set of ESN features including blogs, wikis and activity streams. It enables separate community networks for customers, partners and employees. Clearvale also has APIs to integrate with other applications, and includes integration with SharePoint, Outlook and salesforce.com. | ||
|
Strengths |
Challenges |
|
|
|
|
| Igloo | ||
| Igloo focuses on the primary work use case for ESN – the Intranet – but also supports external collaboration use cases. Its social business application platform integrates cloud file sharing and content management, along with social networking and task management features for collaboration.Igloo is an intranet replacement and alternative to SharePoint, which is growing to become a common use case for ESN providers. Recently, Igloo has also made a push to add OEM distributors such as Swisscom, to broaden its distribution in Europe. Mobile app strategy favors responsive web design. | ||
|
Strengths |
Challenges |
|
|
|
|
| OpenText(Tempo) | ||
| OpenText is a leader in enterprise content management that is extending its capabilities to include ESNs. It has rebranded its offering into Tempo, which has many of the features that customers will want. Tempo offers solid community tools and content management integration, as well as extensive mobile client options.One challenge for OpenText is that it mainly focuses on ECM – or at least this is clearly where its sales organization is focused. That said, Tempo offers a lot of opportunities to enterprises that already have OpenText installed. The challenge is the overall focus on content management and the fact that others are doing more to push social content. | ||
| Strengths | Challenges | |
|
|
|
Aragon Advisory
- Carefully evaluate ESN providers both on current capabilities and on product roadmaps.
- Examine references in similar industries.
- Ensure that mail integration is seamless, so users can collaborate with others in the ESN even if they are not logged in.
- Make sure that a community manager is part of your deployment plan.
Bottom Line
ESNs are becoming more contextual and more focused on solving specific collaborative and knowledge sharing problems. Enterprises should focus on ensuring that content is kept up to date in the community and that ease of use is the over-riding focus to ensure effective and regular use. Also, enterprise social collaboration planners should focus on the key, measurable business outcomes that ESNs provide.
[/private_Provisor level]
Copyright © 2014 Aragon Research Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
</div>