Gartner's Magic Quadrant Dons Microsoft, IBM and Jive (Again)

By Chelsi Nakano (@chelkano) Nov 2, 2010

It's that magical time of year again. Gartner (news, site) has revealed the who's who in social Enterprise software providers via their magic quadrant. Higher eligibility requirements made a tougher game this time around, and the names that didn't make the cut may surprise you.

The Winner's Circle

First things first: Gartner's top dogs of 2009 — Jive, IBM and Microsoft — retained their positions in the "Leaders" quadrant this year with no added company, while the same went for Atlassian and Open Text in the "Challengers" block.

Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace 2010

Change was big in both the "Niche Players" and "Visionaries" sections however, as several vendors were completely dropped. MindTouch, Tomoye, EMC, Mzinga and eTouchSystems are just a few of this year's jilted. Only one new company, XWiki, was added.

Here's a look at the 2009 quadrant for comparison:

Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace 2009

Raising the Stakes / Notable Mentions

Meanwhile, despite all the buzz, a large number of popular names didn't appear in the quadrant at all. Gartner made mention of them in the official release, noting that even though they haven't been formally included, they should still be of interest:

Alfresco
Box.net
BroadVision
Cisco
Cornerstone OnDemand
FatWire Software
KickApps
Moxie Software
Oracle
Salesforce.com's Chatter
Yammer

Surprised? It was the change in criteria that really did it. Gartner now requires each vendor provide four "references" from organizations that have the product deployed to at least 5,000 employees and are willing to talk about it. Further, the research company looked for general purpose products that focus on internal teams and market presence (at least 15 different customers, 100,000 active seats total).

As for desirable functions, it was the usual:

blogs
configurable group, project, team or community areas
document sharing
discussion forums
roles and access control
user management
user profiles
wikis

"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," stated the report. "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."

The Right Balance

If it's your goal to make the quadrant, or at least choose a vendor that's dressed to impress, here's a quick look at what's doing it for the judges at the moment: