June 23rd, 2010
As sites and technologies such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have captured the imagination of millions of individuals around world, organisations are also beginning to question whether, and how, they too might be able to take advantage of these online communities or adapt them for use in a business context. Indeed, one of the biggest trends which has developed over the last couple of years is the use of business-focused online communities. These can support collaboration and communication in many different areas of business, from internal knowledge sharing amongst colleagues, to improving relationships with customers and partners.
As we move beyond the early adopter phase we’re starting to see trends and best practices emerge. So too the technology marketplace is maturing, as vendors recognise the bigger picture and the potential of online communities within a broader enterprise collaboration strategy.
This is an area that we’re doing a lot of research on at the moment. Last month we published two reports: Building online communities for business and Implementing online communities for business. Today we published the first in a series of case studies, looking at how Swiss Re was able to improve their internal collaboration and knowledge sharing capabilities using online community software. We’re going to follow this up soon with a series of assessments reports that focus on the leading technology vendors, along with a companion technology guide. Stay tuned for more information on that.
We’re also really excited to start telling you about a free online event we’ll be launching in September. It’s in the early stages of development today, but it’s going to look a lot like this event we’re running on Reinventing customer experiences with BPM and this one on Time to define your Cloud strategy. For our online communities event we’d love to include some interviews with organisations that have already got started with either internally- or externally-facing online communities. We’ve already got several lined up, but we’re always on the lookout for great stories. If you’ve already implemented online community technology in your organisation and you’d like to share your experiences and best practices with others and shine a light on your successes, drop us a line and we’ll let you know what’s involved. We’ll also tell you what we’d like to offer you in return for your time and participation.
If this is an area you’re exploring yourself take a look at our reports and make sure you’re signed up for a free Guest Pass account so we can keep you updated about the event and let you know when it’s been launched (tick the box to say you’re happy to receive news and updates from us by email).
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June 17th, 2010
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Interesting annuncement from Socialtext – apparently following in the footsteps of Salesforce.com's Chatter application by aggregating enterprise application events and notifications, as well as content from web apps such as Twitter and Google Buzz – and presumably delivering these alongside the user-generated status updates from Socialtext Signals. Still early days as it's only in beta at the moment, but it's interesting that despite mentioning how you could surface app events from e.g. CRM and ERP apps, it's SharePoint and Lotus Connections that the company have targeted for their first out-of-the-box connectors…
Posted in Service news, collaboration | No Comments »
June 15th, 2010
At the Enterprise 2.0 conference this week, social software vendor Jive Software made a series of announcements designed to cement its position at the forefront of today’s social software market – both in terms of its share and profile within the market, and as an innovator and market driver in the space. Two of the announcements were particularly significant:
- Jive What Matters – a new dashboard which aggregates relevant information from a variety of sources including Jive Social Business Software and social sources such as Twitter – is a new release designed to help users get to grips with the vast amount of information that continues to flow towards them, particularly in the social world of realtime notifications and alerts.
- Jive Apps Market - an applications market place (as the name suggests) which enables third-party developers to build and sell applications on top of the Jive Social Business Software platform, to support specific industry needs or business functions.
Other announcements included a partnership with CSC in conjunction with the Jive Apps Market launch (under which CSC has agreed to resell Jive’s solutions as well as committing to develop mobile applications based on the Jive SBS platform), Jive’s licensing of Twitter Firehose (Twitter’s unrestricted data streaming API) to support Jive What Matters, and the availability of the SaaS-based, hosted version of Jive SBS on the Google Apps Marketplace.
It is clear from these announcements – and the fast-paced momentum at the company at present – that Jive Software is determined to carve out a leadership position in the social software market, making it the first choice independent vendor for organisations looking at how they can leverage this technology, and lifting it beyond the realms of the small start-up towards the serious enterprise deals usually reserved for the likes of Microsoft and IBM. As I’ve discussed in previous posts (e.g. Jive Software announces $12 million in new funding and Starting 2010 with a flourish: Jive acquires Filtrbox), the company has achieved significant revenue growth over the last couple of years, and appears to be comfortably on course for an IPO – which is widely expected for early 2011, although there has been no official confirmation as yet. In particular, it is reassuring to see a company that is able to balance its enthusiasm for a new wave of technology like social software with an understanding of the practical requirements and expectations within a large enterprise – and it is this, fundamentally, which is fuelling its success in such a highly competitive, fragmented, and poorly understood marketplace.
See our On The Radar report on Jive.
For more analysis of collaboration trends and best practices, click here to download free Guest Pass reports, and click here for more on our premium collaboration advisory service.
Posted in Service news, collaboration | 1 Comment »
June 9th, 2010
Despite Novell’s long history in the collaboration software market through its trusty email platform GroupWise, the company has been largely forgotten as an enterprise collaboration software player over the last few years. Those closer to the company may have been aware of the launch of two new collaboration products back in 2007 – a team workspace offering (Teaming) and a web conferencing tool (Conferencing) – however these too have failed to raise the company’s profile in the collaboration market in the way the company might have hoped, and neither have they greatly boosted its flagging revenues in this area. In the meantime, Novell’s other business areas – such as security, systems management and its Linux server business, for example – have grown significantly by comparison, and to a large extent define the way in which the Novell brand is viewed today.
And so it was against this backdrop that I attended this year’s Novell Brainshare conference in Amsterdam in May – with relatively low expectations from a collaboration perspective, prepared to have to pluck snippets of collaboration strategy from a vast sea of security and systems management information (which, frankly, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to). However, while I was, I think, the only analyst in attendance with a specific collaboration focus (which I took as a bad sign!), in fact I was pleasantly surprised by the event. There was indeed a significant focus on what the company terms “Intelligent Workload Management” – which incorporates Novell’s security, systems management and SuSe Linux business in a convincing strategy designed to help organisations manage and optimise their IT infrastructure both on premise and in the cloud – but there was also a major emphasis on collaboration and how Novell intends to pull these two sides of its business together while reinvigorating its collaboration software business.
I will be looking at Novell’s collaboration software strategy in detail in a forthcoming Vendor Insight report, but at a high level there are two central pieces to the strategy:
- Novell Pulse – this is a real-time, social collaboration platform which is due for release later this year. Built using the Google Wave protocol, Novell sees solutions like Pulse becoming the heart of future collaboration strategy, with other tools including email, team workspaces and web conferencing acting as services which feed into or out of this central hub.
- Collaboration Data Management – this is an evolving strategy which aims to apply Novell’s expertise in security and systems management to enterprises’ collaboration environments, enabling data from multiple collaborative sources to be managed and secured centrally, synchronising internal and external data sources, and supporting both on-premise and cloud-based services, as well as a combination of the two environments.
Overall, the strategy from a product perspective seems strong, although there are still significant questions around how well the company can communicate and sell its vision to the right people within enterprises, particularly given its IT-centric background and its parallel focus on Intelligent Workload Management.
You can read our Capability Summary and Overview of Novell’s collaboration software offering here.
For more analysis of collaboration trends and best practices, click here to download free Guest Pass reports, and click here for more on our premium collaboration advisory service.
Tags: Industry news
Posted in research | 2 Comments »
June 9th, 2010
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Another one chalked up for Google Apps – this time it's global manufacturer Brady which has rolled the suite out to its 6,000-strong employee base. I assume the decision was primarily email-driven, although this is largely glossed over in the announcement.
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June 8th, 2010
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Zoho announces a new cross-application search capability for its services – a great tool for organisations using multiple Zoho tools for their business. At present it covers mail, contacts, discussions and productivity tools such as Writer, but the company promises to add other applications including CRM and Projects in time.
Posted in Service news, collaboration | No Comments »
March 26th, 2010
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This article by Laurel Papworth includes an excellent collection of usage policies published by various organisations on how their employees should be using social media tools and online communities, while drawing out the main topics across these policies and some of the fundamental issues you need to consider when creating your own social media policies.
Posted in Service news, collaboration | No Comments »
March 11th, 2010
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An interesting announcement from Avaya and Polycom, particularly given Cisco's acquisition of Polycom's competitor Tandberg. This relationship makes a lot of sense, and I can't help thinking that this is the first step in an even closer relationship… M&A anyone?
Posted in Service news, collaboration | No Comments »
