E X C E R P T I D C M a r k e t S c a p e : 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 Michael Fauscette Amy Konary Global Headquarters: 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA 01701 USA P.508.872.8200 F.508.935.4015 www.idc.com I N T H I S E X C E R P T The content for this excerpt was taken directly from the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Enterprise Social Software 2012 Vendor Analysis by Vanessa Thompson, Amy Konary and Michael Fauscette (Doc # 237336). All or parts of the following sections are included in this excerpt: IDC Opinion, In This Study, Situation Overview, Future Outlook, Essential Guidance, and Learn More. Also included is Figure 1. 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 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
I N T H I S S T U D Y 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 may impact the ability to serve customer requirements and gain future market share. It uses a scoring and ranking model based on qualitative and quantitative criteria resulting in a single graphical illustration of each vendor's position in the market. This study is supported by a discussion of key criteria that IDC has identified and that contribute to a vendor's current and future success as well as an outline of the key differentiators that highlight each participant's placement in the IDC MarketScape. M e t h o d o l o g y IDC MarketScape criteria selection, weightings, and vendor scores represent wellresearched 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. 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.
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 A n a l y s i s Socialcast by VMware Socialcast was founded in 2008, raising a total of $9.4 million before being acquired by VMware in May 2011. Socialcast by VMware started as an enterprise microblogging platform, developing into a product focused on building enterprise social networks, part of the VMware end-user computing group. The company offers native application support for iphone, ipad, Android, and BlackBerry and will soon release a native Windows Phone client. The application blends HTML5 for the activity stream with native device controls. A desktop application and outlook connector provide 100% access to Socialcast through
Microsoft Outlook. Socialcast administrators set up the parameter for external group collaboration, and then users are able to create public, private, or external groups. Group interactions, shared files, and comments can be archived. Since October 2010, Socialcast by VMware has offered REACH extensions to extract data from business systems and surface it in the activity stream. REACH offers programmatic access to the same functionality available through a community's Web interface, with logic to parse standalone Open Graph Protocol schema available "out of the box." Socialcast by VMware is a multitenant SaaS offering, with the service also offered as an on-premise virtual appliance and hosted instances through managed service providers. On-premise and SaaS product updates are issued once a month, with customers having the ability to set up automatic server updates. Prior to the acquisition, the company had no channel engagement. Now the company leverages the VMware partner, reseller, and system integrator community, with a near-term focus on building specialized partners. In 2012, Socialcast by VMware is focusing on strengthening existing application partnerships in the end-user computing group with Horizon Data (the VMware enterprise file sync and share service) as well as the appliance-based email service Zimbra. Complementary product offerings are being sought with channel partners to help customers build Web apps like MITEL for unified communications. Socialcast by VMware is a Leader in this analysis. The company will focus on three main areas for future growth: solution extensibility to allow integrations with other systems and business services; offering exemplary case studies, building further security and compliance measures into solutions; and focusing on end-user adoption and user experience training, supported by an automated and dedicated resource customer success team. The ability to link business systems and services together in a secure but open application framework has given the company a leadership position. IDC believes that if Socialcast by VMware is able to leverage the close relationship of VMware and EMC, particularly since EMC's acquisition of Syncplicity, the workflow, content, and social experiences enabled for knowledge workers will displace standalone enterprise social software players. E S S E N T I A L G U I D A N C E A c t i o n s t o C o n s i d e r In the sections that follow, IDC offers guidance for vendors and IT decision makers looking at the market for enterprise social software solutions. Advice for Vendors A seamless native and in-application experience is a baseline customer expectation. Vendors need to service this across all target application interfaces including multiple mobile form factors. Social software solutions need to support a number of open standards OAuth, Activitystre.ms, and Open Graph at a minimum to foster a community of
developers that will build solution extensions and integrations and eventually integrate social solutions together. Data models need to be extensible to customers and application partners so that behavioral and predictive analysis may be performed on data generated by the network. Solutions should include secure groups options to enable users to enable external constituents to actively collaborate in a group with rich access to content and data provided by the solution. Ideation and idea management solution components will be increasingly required to facilitate feedback from customers, partners, suppliers, and broader communities of users. Solutions will need to include lightweight task and workflow management in order to facilitate social processes at the point of work. 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. L E A R N M O R E R e l a t e d R e s e a r c h VMworld 2012: The Future of Work Is Social (IDC #236791, September 2012) The State of Enterprise Social Software Adoption in 2012 (IDC #236637, September 2012) IDC Competitive Market Insight: Microsoft Calendar 2Q12 Update (IDC #236370, August 2012)
IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Mobile Unified Communications and Collaboration 2012 Vendor Analysis (IDC #235819, July 2012) IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Social Technology in Integrated Talent Management 2012 Vendor Analysis (IDC #236025, July 2012) Microsoft Buys Enterprise Social Network Vendor Yammer for $1.2 Billion (IDC #lcus23566512, June 2012) Worldwide Enterprise Social Software 2012 2016 Forecast (IDC #235471, June 2012) Worldwide Enterprise Social Software 2011 Vendor Shares (IDC #235273, June 2012) Cisco Quad Goes WebEx Social (IDC #lcus23558612, June 2012) S y n o p s i s This IDC study uses the IDC MarketScape model to provide an assessment of a number of vendors participating in the enterprise social software market. The IDC MarketScape is an evaluation based on a comprehensive framework and a set of parameters that assess vendors relative to one another and to those factors expected to be most conducive to success in a given market during the short and the long term. "The ultimate goal of enterprise social software is to support a business' ability to surface information in real time and in context in a way that enables a broader business system of relationship," says Vanessa Thompson, research manager for IDC's Enterprise Social Networks and Collaborative Technologies. "Customers will continue to demand 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." 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 sales@idc.com 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.