Forrester Wave, Enterprise Social Platforms: IBM, Jive, NewsGator, Telligent & More

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Aug 25, 2011

There's a brand spanking new Forrester Wave report out that focuses on the best enterprise social platforms available today. Why organizations are using them and who makes the list is our focus today.

It's About the Customer AND the Employee

Maybe it's true that many organizations don't like to talk about being "social", that the term doesn't mean a heck of a lot when it comes to running a business, but they still understand that to succeed in today's economy, they have to do two very important things:

Engage and interact with customers
Embrace and encourage innovation and collaboration with employees

That's right, while the customer is extremely important to the overall success of a business, the role the employee plays is really no less important. So how does an organization provide an internal landscape that brings out the best of their employees? They develop a solid strategy around, and implement, an enterprise social platform.

In Forrester's report, The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Social Platforms, Q3 2011, author Rob Koplowitz says that there has been a big shift from focusing on technology such as ERP, Human Capital Management (HCM, product lifecycle management (PLM) to collaboration tools (25% planning in 2011 investments in the former category vs 37% planning investment in collaboration tools). Three key factors are influencing this shift in technologies:

Capture and re-use knowledge
Maintain human connections across a disparate workforce
Pressure to use new technologies for today's demanding workforce

Forrester's View of Enterprise Social Platforms

Only a matter of time before Forrester had a Wave report that looked at enterprise social platforms. Didn't we use to call them Enterprise 2.0 platforms? Regardless of the name you attach, there are any number of these platforms on the market, supporting a wide range of capabilities.

There are nine platforms discussed in this report:

IBM
Jive Software
NewsGator
Telligent
Atlassian
Microsoft
OpenText
Cisco
SocialText

But there are many others as Forrester notes supporting a number of capabilities ranging from microblogging & activities streams (think Yammer) to social technology extensions (think Chatter for Salesforce.com and WebCenter for Oracle). And of course there are many new and smaller entrants into this market including Moxie Software, Igloo and Saba.

You should know the Forrester evaluation process by now, it's based on market presence, strategy and current offering. Current offering capabilities includes: 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.

Ok, so in a nutshell:

IBM, Jive, NewsGator and Telligent lead
Atlassian, Microsoft, Socialtext competitive
OpenText and Cisco in the game

Enterprise Social Platform Leaders

Seeing IBM in a leadership position is no surprise (really none of these are surprises when you take the time to think about both product offerings and market presence). I had a great talk with Jeff Schick, IBM's VP of Social Software earlier this week about IBM Connections and what is clear is that IBM is focused integrating social capabilities across all of its systems (see IBM Offers Real-time Compliance for Connections 3.1). Schick said that IBM was transforming itself, identifying how to improve business processes by being more agile and transparent. IBM sees social as the fundamental fabric to infuse into the way people do their work.