Gartner 2011 MQ Social Software in the Workplace

8/13/2019 Gartner 2011 MQ Social Software in the Workplace

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ResearchG00214779

25 August 2011

Magic Quadrant for Social Software in theWorkplaceNikos Drakos, Jeffrey Mann, Carol Rozwell, Tom Austin, Adam Sarner

Vendors of social applications, enterprise platforms and business

applications are now targeting the market for social software in the

workplace. As more products become "good enough," IT buyers are

being more influenced by the vendors' strength in adjacent markets.

What You Need to KnowThe options for buying enterprise social software products continue to broaden. Vendors include:

Specialist social application vendors.

Established enterprise platform vendors such as Microsoft and IBM that are refining social

capabilities.

Business application vendors such as salesforce.com that seek to add to the value of their

products for nonspecialist users.

Enterprises continue to invest because they need to support community hubs, idea sharing, expertise

location, project teams, social intranets, collaborative document authoring and better communication.

Since 2010, enterprises have started to implement internal activity streams and social networking as

another way to achieve these objectives. Buyers must know which activities they want to support in

order to choose the right vendors and products.

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Magic Quadrant

Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace

Source: Gartner (August 2011)

Market Overview

Vendors can fairly easily put together entry-level social software technology as a product. Vendors understand

the functional criteria we use for this Magic Quadrant (such as profiles and authoring). They can embed open-

source platforms and components in commercial products to make it even easier to bring them to the market.

And all vendors featured in this Magic Quadrant have reached a respectable level of enterprise acceptance.

However, this apparent stability hides some fundamental changes occurring in the market for enterprise social

software. For example, vendors from other, more established software categories have started to enter this

market. Within the enterprise, social software has started to evolve into an information-sharing platform. Theleaders of social initiatives should factor these and other trends into their strategic plans, and make buying

decisions based, in part, on how vendors will adjust to the new realities, not just on their current products and

market position.

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The Influence of Adjacent Markets

As investments in enterprise social software grow into enterprisewide initiatives, the IT organization must ensure

that social software aligns with other information management initiatives. Increasingly, enterprises are

emphasizing integration with related investments, such as:

Content management, compliance and search.

A broader communication infrastructure for email, presence, real-time conferencing, voice and video.

A specific business activity, such as customer support.

At the same time, some vendors have recognized that social functions can add value to existing product lines

and that closer integration with their application portfolio enhances social networking products.

As a result, the market is seeing more collaboration and social technology from many different kinds of vendors

whose products align in different ways to other IT systems, based on technical integration or simply packaging.

Some products share common repositories or infrastructure with other applications. Some share a common user

interface that enables collaboration and social functions to be embedded in another system. Some have common

user profiles, metadata and object models, while others align in terms of marketing, licensing, or packaging and

bundling. This Magic Quadrant includes three kinds of vendors:

Social application vendorsthat offer primarily self-contained social software functions (albeit with some

integration points to allow for information flow to and from other systems), including Atlassian, blueKiwi,

Igloo, Jive, Moxie Software, MindTouch, Novell, Socialtext, Telligent and XWiki.

Enterprise platform vendorswith a broad, deep presence across the enterprise, particularly with portals,

content, application development and deployment, workflow, search and other capabilities. This cluster

includes Drupal-Acquia, Ektron, EPiServer, IBM, Liferay, Microsoft and OpenText.

Business application vendors,especially those already supporting horizontal "people processes," such as

performance management and learning, or people-intensive vertical business processes, such as account

management and customer service. Such vendors include Cornerstone OnDemand, Mzinga, Saba,

salesforce.com and SuccessFactors.

As more products meet the baseline for "good enough" functions, the deciding factor for investments in this

market will become alignment with broader content, portal or business application strategies. Today, however,

the most common factors that influence purchasing decisions are:

Alignment with existing technology and platform commitments.

Alignment with existing strategic vendors.

Support for specific use cases.

Support of specific functions.

Time to value.


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Initial and ongoing costs.

Availability of software as a service (SaaS) options.

Support for further customization or development.

Availability of technical and business services.

Level of vendor and product risk.

Evidence of user acceptance (for example, the results of a pilot or freemium use).

Evidence of acceptance by the peer industry group.

A New Universal Information Distribution Mechanism

The overwhelming majority of products reviewed for this Magic Quadrant now support activity streams that are

dynamically updated by user activity, by events elsewhere in the system and by events "injected" into the stream

by external systems. Most support different kinds of streams, including "universal" streams, personal streams

and streams that reflect activity in a subgroup or community. "Tagging" and "following" make it possible for

individuals to personalize activity streams to their interests in the same way that consumers use Facebook or

Twitter to publish information, as well as consume that from others.

The designs of most business social networking systems are based on their consumer equivalents. They prove

popular with users who are already familiar with consumer tools such as Facebook and Google+, and who would

like similar enterprise networking tools appropriate for internal confidential conversations. Such business

networking tools are beginning to be used to bind together activity across team rooms, email and other internal

systems, or even activity on the public Internet. Vendors must now help users to filter the torrent of messages

likely to flow into activity streams, and vendors must also keep up with the expectations created by consumer

social networking services.

Growing Cloud Acceptance

Some rough calculations based on self-reported vendor revenue from cloud instances (single or multitenant)

suggest that cloud deployments represent 5% to 7% of the market for workplace social software (see Note 1).

We expect this figure to continue to grow as vendor offerings mature and as SaaS becomes more trusted. Based

on feedback from clients, we still believe that large enterprises overwhelmingly prefer on-premises installations.

Mobile Browser Access

Every vendor makes at least some content and services accessible from smartphone browsers and, with one ortwo exceptions, they also optimize the experience with appropriate templates. In addition to browser access,

about half the vendors in this Magic Quadrant offer native applications for Apple iOS devices (iPhone and/or

iPad). About a third of the vendors offer native applications for BlackBerry devices, while only a quarter offer

Windows Mobile applications.

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CiscoQuad is a modular platform for social collaboration with a strong emphasis on mobility, video and unified

communications support. Quad can be deployed on a large scale, on-premises and through virtualized hardware.

It combines a broad set of capabilities, including rich profiles and a social graph, activity streams, communities

and social metadata (tagging, recommendations), all on top of a common content store and "pluggable"

framework that integrates with content management, instant messaging, voice, conferencing and video services

from Cisco or other vendors.

Huddleoffers a SaaS product for structured document-centric collaboration and conferencing. It is used for

internal collaboration, as well as for collaboration between organizations.

NewsGator'sSocial Sites offering is the product most frequently mentioned by Gartner clients in relation to

Microsoft SharePoint add-ons for extending SharePoint's social networking capability with minimum overlaps

and deep integration into the SharePoint user interface. Social Sites is available for Microsoft Office SharePoint

Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Server 2010. It improves usability and adds wizards for profiles and

expertise discovery, ideation, badging, video, RSS aggregation, self-service community subscriptions, and

activity streams with filtered views.

OracleWebCenter includes several components that are relevant in the context of this report, in addition to

support for portal, business process management, content management, search and mashup/application

development. Social collaboration is through Oracle WebCenter Spaces, which includes social networking, wikis,

blogs, activity streams and social tagging.

Qontextoffers a stand-alone on-premises or SaaS collaboration and social networking product with advanced

capabilities. It can be deeply integrated bidirectionally with custom or other vendors' applications. It offers

integrations with identity services, such as Intel Expressway Cloud Access 360, and business applications, such

as NetSuite, LeadFormix, SugarCRM, HRnet and Herald Logic.

SAPStreamWork is a hybrid SaaS and on-premises collaboration solution with specific support for

brainstorming, pro/con tables, activity tracking and decision recording, as well as other Web 2.0 applications. It

integrates with enterprise applications and business processes, and can be used both internally and with external

participants.

ThoughtFarmerfocuses on "social intranets," combining traditional intranet features, such as news, content

pages and an employee directory, with social tools, such as wikis and blogs. It includes innovative features, such

as email integration and "on the fly" translation.

Tibco Software'stibbr offers a broad set of social networking capabilities, including a "subject"-based

information organization architecture. Tibbr is available as a SaaS or an on-premises product for the same price.In addition to the core social networking functionality, tibbr leverages Tibco's strong integration background with

out-of-the-box bidirectional connectors for Oracle, SAP, salesforce.com and SharePoint. Tibbr includes tibCast,

a set of unified communications tools running in the context of the activity stream, including videoconferencing

and audioconferencing, desktop sharing, IM and presence.

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Traction Software'sTeamPage is a sophisticated authoring and collaboration environment with email

integration, rich-media support, integrated search, activity streams and support for task-oriented activities.

TWikiis an open-source product that started as an enterprise wiki and has become a broader collaboration

platform. It is used for collaborative document authoring, project documentation and team collaboration. The

open-source developer community is represented by TWiki.org, while a commercial organization (Twiki Inc.[twiki.net]) sells commercially supported, enhanced versions, such as Twiki Workspaces.

VMware'sacquisition of Socialcast a social networking vendor brings another enterprise player into the

social software market. Apart from continuing to be available as a stand-alone on-premises or cloud offering for

internal social networking, Socialcast's technology is also likely to be used as part of VMware's Project Horizon

platform for managing and delivering cloud applications from partners to enterprise desktops and other devices.

Yammeroffers a social networking and microblogging platform for enterprise collaboration. Its freemium model

is popular with many end users who have introduced it into their organizations. It would be of interest to those

looking for a private Facebook-like platform with additional capabilities including group private messaging, Q&A,

polls, group events, desktop and mobile apps, internal and external groups, single sign-on, and integration withActive Directory and third-party applications such as SharePoint and NetSuite.

Market Definition/Description

This Magic Quadrant covers vendors whose products are used within an enterprise, primarily among employees,

to support work teams, communities and employee networking. The buyers in this market are looking for

persistent virtual environments in which participants can create, organize and share information, as well as find,

connect and interact with each other. The business use of these products varies in the degree of formality and

openness from team information sharing and project coordination among a small, homogeneous group, to

sharing best practices within a business unit, to encouraging networking and knowledge transfer among

employees across the whole organization.

In general terms, products that compete in this market help users to:

Find out about each other personally or professionally.

Mine their own networks of contacts and acquaintances for advice, references and referrals.

Form teams, communities or informal groups.

Work together on the same work objects.

Discuss and comment on their work. Organize work from their perspective.

Identify relevant work.

Discover other people with common interests.

Alert users to information or events that may be relevant to them.
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Learn from others' expertise.

Some specific uses of products in this market include:

Sharing team information and coordinating project-related activities by adding permanence and structure to

ad hoc communications.

Empowering communities of experts and interested parties (bonding people by specific interests, capturing

best practices, disseminating lead-user innovation and providing an informal support network).

Facilitating social interaction by helping people to establish and strengthen personal relationships and

develop trust, and, ultimately, reduce friction and accelerate the business processes in which people are

engaged.

Accessing relevant knowledge and expertise that can be used to formulate a plan of action when decisions

need to be made.

We cover the markets for social CRM and externally facing social software in separate Magic Quadrants. The

three social software markets attract different sets of vendors, and the dynamics differ because the needs of thethree groups of users differ. In such closely related markets, some vendors will naturally appear in two, or even all

three, Magic Quadrants.

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

This Magic Quadrant includes vendors that offer a product or products packaged, marketed and sold specifically

to support internal teams, communities and networking within an enterprise. The buyers must use the product for

general-purpose internal teams, communities and networks. The products are not limited to a specific business

process such as project management, e-learning or customer service, or to a specific industry such as publishing

or entertainment. Each vendor must have:

At least 15 customers running the product for internal use.

At least 100,000 internal users (seats).

Four named customers that use its product internally, with at least 5,000 active users each, and that were

willing to provide feedback to Gartner.

At least $5 million in revenue directly related to internal usage of the product.

In addition, vendors' products must offer all the following functions out of the box with no need to purchase other

products:

User management:Ability to create, modify or retire user accounts.

User profiles:Information about each user that can be accessed by other users.

Roles and access control:Support for multiple roles (such as editor, facilitator, community manager and

moderator) with associated access controls.

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Configurable group, project, team or community areas:Users with the right permissions can create themed

areas for a group, project, team or community.

Document sharing:Ability to upload, store, organize and share documents.

Discussion forums:Support for a persistent environment in which to post questions and answers or to have

general discussions.

Blogs:User instant publishing functions that display entries in reverse chronological order and permit

comments from others.

Wikis:Group authoring of collections of pages with support for click to edit, change tracking and internal

linking.

Added

Cornerstone OnDemand.

MindTouch.

Moxie Software.

Mzinga.

Dropped

Huddle.

NewsGator.

Realcom U.S.

ThoughtFarmer.

Traction Software.

TWiki.

With the exception of NewsGator, the reason why these vendors were not included in the 2011 assessment was

that they did not meet the market presence criteria, such as revenue, numbers of customers, the requirement to

provide contact details for four reference customers with at least 5,000 internal users each, or the requirement for

actual use to be focused on internal use within an organization. While it met other criteria, NewsGator was not

included because it relies on a third-party product (Microsoft's SharePoint) for some of the required teaming and

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Evaluation Criteria

Ability to Execute

Product/Service:The overall vendor product/service functionality rating was developed by evaluating specific

functionality that is already available and, in particular, the extent to which the product goes beyond the baseline

functionality required for inclusion. Some of the functionality we looked for includes social network analysis,

browser-based productivity suites, dynamic activity streams, document repository integration, social tagging,

social bookmarking, social search, general analytics, expertise location, group formation based on common

interests, content/people ratings, people/content recommendations, offline support and native mobile clients.

Also, as part of the overall score, we took into account the maturity of the product (the number of versions

released and how long the product has been available) and any evidence of large-scale deployments.

Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial, Strategy, Organization):Key aspects of this criterion are the

vendor's financial health, including funding, who is investing in and backing its activities, its profitability, theoverall size of its collaboration and social software business (in particular, dedicated employee numbers), and the

degree to which the organization is committed to this part of its business.

Sales Execution/Pricing:This describes the vendor's ability to sell to large organizations, its price transparency

and straightforward sales process, consistent revenue growth in the past 12 to 24 months, and the opportunity to

move existing customers to products with new or additional capabilities.

Market Responsiveness and Track Record:This refers to a vendor's ability to respond, change direction, be

flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and

market dynamics change. Specifically, we looked at evidence of this in the history of the product (for example,

acquisitions, development and updates) and in the actions and comments of the product management team.

Marketing Execution:We looked for evidence of mind share, thought leadership and brand recognition, and for

any specific marketing initiatives (white papers, events, microsites, social media campaigns) that may have

helped to promote them. One particularly effective approach is for senior executives to be active participants in

ongoing online conversations via their blogs or comments. We also took into account the size of the marketing

organization.

Customer Experience:We looked for customer feedback from vendor-supplied references, Gartner inquiries

and other customer-facing interactions, such as Gartner conferences. Customer experiences were rated based

on the vendor's ability to help customers achieve positive business value, as well as sustained user adoption,

and quality implementation and ongoing support. We also took into account the mix of customers (large as well

as smaller organizations), overall customer numbers, and evidence of outstanding customer successes.

Operations:Factors included the quality of the organizational structure skills, experiences, programs, systems

and other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis. We also

looked at technology and service partners, training and certification programs, R&D resources, the presence of

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any independent activities adding value to the core product (for example, open-source add-on modules), the size

of the support organization and the presence of active customer communities for peer support.

Table 1 shows the weightings for our specific evaluation criteria.

Table 1. Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Product/Service High

Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial, Strategy, Organization) High

Sales Execution/Pricing Standard

Market Responsiveness and Track Record Standard

Marketing Execution Standard

Customer Experience High

Operations High

Source: Gartner

Completeness of Vision

Market Understanding:The vendor needs to demonstrate a strategic understanding of collaboration and social

software opportunities, such as an understanding of the business value of social interaction support, thecomplementarity of related capabilities (content, portal, communications services), an urgency to preintegrate

them, a tolerance and acknowledgment of other existing but related technologies from other vendors, and an

overall vision of the space that focuses more on supporting people-centric activities and less on a formal,

process-centric view of collaboration.

Marketing Strategy:The degree to which the vendor's marketing approach aligns with (and/or leverages)

emerging trends and the overall direction of the market. In particular, we looked at the "use cases" promoted in

the vendors' marketing messages, its online activities and any programs for educating and priming the market

connected with social interaction support (for example, "try before you buy," open-source versions and hosted

versions).

Sales Strategy:We looked at the level of channel activity, and any strategy for converting large numbers of early

adopters to high-end or broader deployments.

Offering (Product) Strategy:This is the degree to which the vendor's product road map reflects demand trends

and opportunities to create demand in the market and fill current gaps or address weaknesses. We also looked at

interoperability with communications services (email, IM, presence, Web conferencing and Internet Protocol

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telephony), the interoperability with business applications, integration of video and rich-media services, mobile

support, and the alignment with related products from the same or other vendors (specifically for content

management, portal functionality and search).

Business Model:We looked at the levels of investment needed to achieve profitability and revenue growth, the

balance of service and license revenue, evidence of success with repeatable revenue (for example, subscriptionlicensing) and low-cost distribution, development and support (for example, using open-source licensing).

Vertical/Industry Strategy:The level of emphasis the vendor places on vertical solutions and the vendor's depth

of vertical expertise.

Innovation:The degree to which the vendor is investing in R&D directed toward development of the tools, and

the extent to which the vendor demonstrates "creative energy." Examples include: browser-based, rich,

collaborative authoring and integration with office suites; desktop clients and offline support; native mobile client

applications; app store or marketplace for easy access to partner applications; social metrics (popularity,

sentiment, influence); and application integration with activity streams.

Geographic Strategy:We examined the vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the

specific needs of regions outside the corporate headquarters' location, directly or through partners, channels and

subsidiaries, as appropriate for that geography and market.

Table 2 shows the weightings for our specific evaluation criteria.

Table 2. Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Market Understanding High

Marketing Strategy Standard

Sales Strategy Standard

Offering (Product) Strategy High

Business Model Low

Vertical/Industry Strategy Standard

Innovation High

Geographic Strategy Standard

Source: Gartner

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Leaders

Leaders are well-established vendors with widely used social software and collaboration offerings. Their

leadership has been established through an early recognition of user needs in this market, continuous innovation,

overall market presence, and success in delivering user-friendly and solution-focused suites with broadcapabilities.

Challengers

Vendors in the Challengers' quadrant offer solutions that are poised to move them into the Leaders' quadrant but

have not yet done so. They have a strong market presence in general, or strong products, and the market

position and resources to become Leaders. But they may not have the same functional breadth, marketing

strategy or rate of innovation as those in the Visionaries' quadrant. Challengers do have an established presence,

credibility and viability, and once their products move beyond a good-enough baseline, they are likely to leverage

their existing customer base to leap-frog others and move into the Leaders' quadrant.

Visionaries

Visionaries in the market demonstrate a strong understanding of current and future market trends and directions,

such as the importance of a flexible and transparent collaboration environment, as well as the value of mutual

reinforcement between tools that encourage user contribution and tools that encourage bottom-up group and

structure formation. Their products and product road maps display a tendency for innovation, especially in terms

of architecture and lightweight integration, while their marketing and R&D efforts are often boosted by their

alignment with the open-source ecosystem. The Visionaries in this market have not exhibited the scope of

delivery of the Challengers or Leaders, but have demonstrated vision across a range of capabilities.

Niche Players

Niche Players provide useful focused technology, understand the changing market dynamics, and are working

toward evolving their product capabilities. However, they are still held back by their narrow range of functionality,

lack of clarity in their road map about how and when they will address this, or by lack of market traction. Many of

the smaller vendors may enjoy success relative to their size, but they need to exploit every opportunity to grow

and establish their positions before their competitive differentiation begins to erode. As the social software

market continues to mature, pockets of specialization may solidify. Therefore, a viable alternative strategy for a

minority of smaller vendors is to focus on niche markets serving specific verticals or supporting specific activities.

Many of these vendors are unlikely to break out of the Niche Players' quadrant, even though they may continue

to have a long-term viable business.

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Vendor Strengths and Cautions

Atlassian

Atlassian is in the Challengers' quadrant. Confluence is one of the most widely used wiki-centric collaboration

products for employee teams and projects or community spaces.

Strengths

Strategy:The company has broad capabilities available at low cost with a "low touch" marketing and sales

model. Atlassian offers both an on-premises and hosted offering.

Viability:Atlassian has approximately 350 staff worldwide, growing revenue, a 2010 funding round in which

it raised $60 million, and a very large customer base including many deployments of more than 50,000 users.

Functionality:Confluence's focus on communication and information sharing for projects and its capabilities

in document handling and wiki editing make it natural to use for documentation or product developmentsupport roles.

Cautions

Vision:Confluence is not the main product in Atlassian's portfolio its biggest seller is JIRA, an issue-

tracking system. Although Confluence is evolving fast enough to keep up, it is not leading the sector. Until

Confluence's promised new editor becomes available, some enterprise deployments could be hampered by

Confluence's traditional wiki-style editing.

Customer experience:The availability of plug-ins, extensions and the customization options are welcome in

terms of flexibility a reference customer commented: "the ability to be flexible and extensible to meet our

needs and still remain usable sets it apart from similar solutions" and it "is continually being molded to fit

unique requirements." However, it also requires discipline as "customization is a double edged sword" and

the system is "wild west in terms of best practice and standardization." While Atlassian has improved

support for large customers, there was anecdotal criticism from customers with very large deployments.

Focus:Atlassian's products are typically bought by IT departments and tend to do best in deployments that

involve technical users.

blueKiwi

BlueKiwi is in the Visionaries' quadrant. BlueKiwi was one of the first products to build its user experience around

activity streams, a model increasingly being adopted by social software platforms.

Strengths

Platform:It offers comprehensive functionality, with strong participation, social networking analytics,

microblogging, rich-media support including video, extensive community management, polling and ideation.

These are combined in a single platform that can simultaneously support internal networking, external

communities and social media engagement.

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User experience:It puts strong emphasis on ease of use and an engaging user experience.

Innovation:Customers report that the company regularly provides useful innovations, such as the ability to

invite external users into internal conversations.

Cautions

Viability:BlueKiwi is one of the smallest companies in this Magic Quadrant, with fewer than 50 employees,

limited resources and limited activity outside Europe.

Functionality:The product does not provide some features common to competitors, such as automated

moderation, profile badges, OpenSocial, exporting widgets, third-party developer programs and sentiment

analysis. Some of these are scheduled for later in 2011.

Customer experience:One customer reported that it was difficult to keep up with frequent updates to

maintain dependencies with other systems and to support end users until blueKiwi improved its change

management procedures and instigated regular twice-yearly releases.

Cornerstone OnDemand

Cornerstone OnDemand is a new entrant in the Magic Quadrant, and is positioned as a Niche Player.

Cornerstone OnDemand has expanded its talent management roots to include social networking and community

management. It has a 10-year track record of financial growth and boasts an average 95% annual dollar retention

rate. Consider using Cornerstone Connect to build out an existing talent management or learning system.

Strengths

Ecosystem:The company has a well-organized alliance team that focuses on three areas: partner

enablement, strategy and channel management. It has extended its market reach by selecting partners, such

as ADP, that are authorized to resell its product globally. Viability:Cornerstone OnDemand has a reputation for continued revenue growth and responsible fiscal

management, as is clear from the strong performance of its initial public offering in March 2011. Although the

company is not yet profitable, it is spending extensively on new product development.

Functionality:Most Cornerstone customers use its collaboration and social functionality for social learning

to augment traditional training programs with peer support and on-the-job learning.

Cautions

Visibility:Cornerstone OnDemand is well known in the talent management market, but is still establishing

itself as a major player in the social software and collaboration market.

Integration:To leverage its strength fully in adjacent markets, Cornerstone OnDemand must continue to

work on integration across the modules of its product offerings.

Functionality:It has very limited document authoring and sharing support, and limited mobile support only

via mobile browsers. It has no widget support for user interface integration with other applications.

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Strengths

Ecosystem:The Ektron developer community has more than 7,000 registered users. Ektron Exchange is a

code- and widget-sharing site where Ektron employees, partners and customers share add-ons. Ektron has

an extensive global partner network supported by a partner portal and a partner management methodology

for system integrators, digital agencies, and technology, training and translation partners worldwide.

Functionality:Ektron has strong content authoring and management, video and rich-media support, email

integration, dynamic activity streams that track 30 types of events, and an optional search engine with

relevance raking on the basis of "social distance."

Customer experience:Ektron received positive comments from references on its ability to consistently

move the product forward and on its use of an open .NET Framework with well-documented API that allows

customers to make modifications as needed.

Cautions

Focus:Despite recent success with internal deployments among its customer base, Ektron needs to buildup its visibility as a collaboration and social software vendor independently of its reputation in Web content

management.

Strategy:Despite its growth, the lack of existing relationships with potential customers makes Ektron

vulnerable to good-enough competitors with larger product portfolios and an existing foothold in those

organizations.

Functionality:Ektron has yet to add native support for mobile devices, such as iPhone, iPad or BlackBerry

and Android apps.

EPiServerEPiServer's Relate Intranet Edition can be used to create and manage stand-alone communities, with a focus on

user-generated content and collaboration. Additionally, it can add social facilities to intranets. The company,

which was acquired by a European private equity firm in late 2010, is in the Niche Players' quadrant.

Strengths

Technology:The product's Microsoft-oriented gadget architecture allows the quick introduction of new

features based on the underlying platform. Standard gadgets include moderation, abuse reporting and

community activities.

Ecosystem:The large developer community among implementation partners, particularly in Europe, shares

new developments in an open-source model.

Product:EPiServer's products include specific features, such as personalization, activity tracking and

moderation, designed to appeal to communications and community managers. Personalization features

allow targeting by context, such as member segment.

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Cautions

Ecosystem:EPiServer's products are sold primarily through consulting companies, creative agencies and

system integrators. Its products will be less appealing to users who want to implement them themselves.

Platform:Combining the social features of Relate with EPiServer CMS the company's flagship Webcontent management product is a large part of EPiServer's strategy. It will be less appealing to customers

looking to leverage existing Web content management investments in combination with social media.

Visibility:EPiServer has limited penetration outside Europe, with 60% of its revenue coming from Sweden.

IBM

IBM is in the Leaders' quadrant. IBM Connections was one of the first products to target this market. Other

products in IBM's portfolio such as Lotus Quickr, Sametime, Domino and the WebSphere Portal Server can

broaden the applicability of Connections.

Strengths

Ecosystem and viability:IBM has extensive resources, well-developed channels and a large ecosystem of

system integrators and third-party suppliers to support its offerings.

Scalability:IBM has a long experience of dealing with large customers with demanding requirements. It can

point to several examples of very large and complex implementations.

Vision:Social business is identified by IBM as an important part of its strategic future. IBM has conducted

extensive research into how organizations need to change to become social businesses.

Cautions

Complexity:As IBM relies on several products to address more diverse requirements, each one a large

product in its own right, implementations can become complex.

Consulting:IBM's products typically require extensive installation and customization work usually performed

by consulting business partners.

Technology:Users report that the user interface can be difficult to get used to, and that product installation

and integration are more difficult than they expected.

Igloo

Igloo strengthened its position as a Niche Player by continuing to increase its visibility and reputation as anenterprise vendor. Igloo has demonstrated traction in the healthcare and technology sectors, delivering a solution

that supports both internal and external collaboration.

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Strengths

Viability:Igloo showed positive momentum during 2010 with significant growth in total revenue, deal size,

customer acquisitions and subscription licenses. It invested to bolster its presence in the U.S. and EMEA, as

well as in the channel, to expand its reach.

Functionality:Igloo is a pure SaaS vendor with regular bimonthly releases. Recent enhancements include

social workflow and moderation, as well as out-of-the-box integration with enterprise applications, such as

Microsoft SharePoint and salesforce.com. Future plans include a new version of its desktop client with offline

file synchronization and more extensive native mobile platform support.

Ecosystem:Igloo recently formed a partnership with an open-source Web-conferencing provider to release

the first iteration of real-time collaboration functionality.

Cautions

Visibility:Although the company has large corporate customers, it should continue to build up its visibility

and reputation as an enterprise vendor.

Functionality:Igloo does not currently offer offline capabilities, and there is no app store with third-party

add-ons. Users who want extensions to the Igloo platform must use technical APIs, the partner network or

Igloo's professional services team.

Customer experience:Nontechnical users cited complexity issues when trying to customize the product

beyond what is possible with configuration settings and built-in templates, requiring support from IT.

Jive

A Leader in this Magic Quadrant and in three social software Magic Quadrants last year, Jive continues to gain

enterprise customers, extend its technology vision and grow revenue.

Strengths

Viability:Revenue grew to $70 million in 2010, from 2009's $30 million (Gartner estimates). It announced

several notable board members and another round of venture capital funding in readiness for a widely

expected (but unconfirmed) initial public offering in the next 12 months. Jive has also addressed what

Gartner believed to be a concern in 2010 in terms of limited global system integration and technology

partnerships. It now has: partnerships including those with Accenture, CSC, Deloitte, Infosys and Logica;

digital agency relationships with Dachis, Razorfish, Headshift and Syncapse; and partnerships with Alcatel-

Lucent, Google and SAP for unified communications and analytics.

Innovation:Apart from extensive core functionality both for structured collaboration and networking, Jivecontinues to innovate, especially around rich activity streams with expand/collapse/mute threads, preview

messages, "what matters" and "Jive genius" recommendations, direct messages to specific users and

message prioritization. With its app store, Jive is positioning its product not only as a social application but

also as a platform that is already attracting other technology providers.

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Vision:Jive has bolstered its social software vision with several acquisitions, including those of Proximal

Labs (identity management and analysis), Filtrbox, and OffiSync (Microsoft Office integration). Jive has also

become more pragmatic in terms of coexistence with enterprise and desktop applications and unified

communications, realizing that Jive What Matters may not be the desktop of choice for all its enterprise

customers.

Cautions

Volatility:Jive is an early-stage, venture-capital-funded company and is relatively small by the standards of

enterprise software, although larger than many of its pure-play competitors. While volatility is inherent in the

social software market, Jive may be affected more than smaller, point solution vendors if major infrastructure

software or hardware vendors enter the market.

Global presence:Jive continues to be challenged in developing a European presence, with more than 80%

of its revenue coming from North America, and some European regions adopting social software more slowly

than others. The revenue Jive derives from Asia/Pacific remains very small as a percentage of its total

revenue and it may require local partnerships in order to be successful in the region.

Applications and deployments:Jive's Apps Market was delayed by almost a year from its expected 3Q10

rollout, which in turn delayed technology partnerships that were dependent on that channel. The time and

resource required for enterprise-scale social software deployments may deflect some customers toward

competitors with smaller point solutions that can show more immediate results, with smaller upfront

investments.

Liferay

Liferay is in the Niche Players' quadrant. Liferay offers a portal-centric platform for those looking to develop and

integrate social interaction and community support in a flexible environment.

Strengths

Integration:The collaboration and social interaction capabilities are offered as an integral part of Liferay's

Portal platform, which also includes built-in content management (with hooks to alternative systems), as well

as Microsoft Office and SharePoint integration.

Ecosystem:Liferay has a healthy developer and partner ecosystem with thousands of developers and an

active marketplace.

Strategy:Liferay is one of the few remaining vendors in the portal space and is seeking to extend its position

into collaboration and networking. The open-source, low-cost, support-based model (at approximately

$17,000 per server for unlimited use) is attractive to many buyers.

Cautions

Focus:Although there is some evidence that Liferay Portal is being used to provide collaboration and social

networking in the context of large portal deployments, Liferay is still relatively unknown in this market.

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Customer experience:The portal platform capabilities add flexibility and power when customization is

needed but take longer to deploy. Liferay has less experience in supporting social initiatives than some other

vendors.

Innovation:Despite many enhancements including flexible profiles and some analytics tools to uncover

"social equity" Liferay could do more in terms of collaborative authoring, mobility, offline support,

recommendations and more advanced social analytics.

Microsoft

Microsoft is in the Leader's quadrant because of its very robust ecosystem and the broad penetration of

SharePoint Server 2010 in the marketplace.

Strengths

Integration:Windows, Microsoft Office, Exchange, Lync and SharePoint all work best with each other,

offering the IT organization the appearance of simplicity in terms of training, usability, extensibility and

management.

Functionality:With all the tools, components and services available from the Microsoft SharePoint

ecosystem, along with all the features available in the base product (for example, content management,

search, portal, document-centric programming, traditional team collaboration and social software),

SharePoint has arguably the broadest range of capabilities of any offering in the market.

Viability:Based on input from Gartner clients, we believe that more enterprises are seeking collaboration

and social solutions using SharePoint (or the SharePoint component of Office 365) than any other platform.

This enables Microsoft to charge premium prices for its offerings, fueling the development, marketing and

other investments necessary to sustain its position in the market.

Cautions

References:While some extol SharePoint's virtues, others warn of a higher degree of customization too

many capabilities are available only with customization and coding; and managing security and licensing is

more complex than some clients would like.

Functionality:The user interface is not as intuitive for users who do not post content frequently and

SharePoint's implementation of activity streams is much weaker than that of most products in this market.

Integration:When provisioned from Microsoft's Office 365, there is less functionality available than when

provisioned on premises, and cross-system integration is limited or unavailable.

MindTouch

MindTouch is in the Niche Players' quadrant. MindTouch's product offers collaborative authoring and content

integration capabilities, and is usually deployed to support collaborative documentation creation, often providing

the glue for dynamic integration with other systems.

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Strengths

Integration:MindTouch offers preintegration with several business applications to enable documents, video

and data to be available in a socially enabled environment constructed around dynamic documents. The

most common use cases for MindTouch's product involve collaborative processes concerning dynamic

complex documentation.

Customer experience:Feedback from several customers with large deployments was generally positive.

They commented on responsiveness, the quality of the support team, and the configurability and ease of use

of its product.

Ecosystem:Active developers are contributing to localization and other development efforts through an

open-source version of the product and a partner alliance program.

Cautions

Viability:MindTouch needs to enhance its reputation and its ability to support large enterprise deployments.

Focus:Its emphasis on collaborative dynamic documents is very appealing to many MindTouch customers,

but the product needs to evolve in terms of social interaction and social analytics to support more use cases.

Customer experience:Some customers commented on license complexity and the "growing pains"

associated with a relatively small organization with fewer than 100 employees.

Moxie Software

Moxie Software is in the Niche Players' quadrant. Employee Spaces is a relatively new product launched in 2010

for employee collaboration and networking, as well as for collaboration with partners and customers.

Strengths

Functionality:Moxie Software offers broad support for document sharing, media galleries and video,

including transcoding and streaming, "ideastorms" and idea leader boards, optimized mobile browser

displays and native applications for iOS devices, rich profiles, activity feeds, recommendations, people

search and a bundled Autonomy search engine.

Strategy:It offers all-inclusive packaging with straightforward pricing and emphasis on initial use-case

consulting, as well as follow-on services and access to Moxie Insight (thought leadership and a research

group) to ensure adoption and business impact.

Focus:Moxie's focus on use cases that support innovation, social intranets and private extranets

complements existing investments that many organizations have made in document repositories and portalplatforms.

Cautions

Ecosystem:As a relative newcomer to the space, Moxie is building relationships with channel and service

partners but it could do more to attract independent developers or to provide a marketplace for extensions

or plug-ins.

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Customer experience:Although general user feedback has been positive, especially with respect to

usability, there have not yet been many large-scale deployments of Employee Spaces to validate the ability

of the system and the organization to operate at scale in this market.

Mzinga

Mzinga is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant, providing a platform to host and manage internally and

externally facing communities, as well as related business applications for performance management and social

marketing.

Strengths

Strategy:Mzinga has a comprehensive offering for employee productivity that combines networking and

engagement, social learning, and employee onboarding and performance management.

Functional breadth:Mzinga has a wider range of applications than similar providers. Its applications include

discussions, blogs, comments, ratings, polls, surveys, events, chat, social profiles, mobile support, video

and event management.

Partners:Mzinga partners with interactive agencies, such as Avenue A and Digital Influence Group. Its

technology partnerships include ones with Kaltura for embedded video and media management, iLinc for

Web conferencing and collaboration, Composica for team-based collaborative authoring, and Terremark for

cloud-based hosting services.

Cautions

Customer satisfaction:Although its customer retention is approximately 90%, Mzinga's overall satisfaction

scores were lower than those of other vendors. References mentioned a need for reporting and graphical

user interface improvements (which Mzinga has been working on and improving), as well as shortened

timelines for new implementation support. References also mentioned that Mzinga is not keeping pace withcompetitors.

Growth:For 2010, Gartner estimates that Mzinga's total revenue was $30 million to $35 million, with a

growth rate of 20%. This is below the average of Mzinga's direct competitors the average growth rate for

2010 was 35% to 40%.

Social analytics:At the time of publishing, Mzinga did not provide its own external social monitoring/

analytics capabilities, unlike many of its competitors. It plans to launch its own product later in 2011.

Novell

Novell is in the Niche Players' quadrant. Novell Vibe is usually deployed for project and team collaboration,networking, and knowledge management for internal and external teams.

Strengths

Functionality:Novell Vibe is a capable suite that combines strong traditional collaboration capabilities

including support for documents, workflow and e-forms, as well as rich social networking functionality.

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Integration:It offers preintegration with Novell's email, presence and IM systems, as well as with those from

other vendors or with custom applications.

Strategy:Novell is promoting Vibe through its global channel and partners.

Cautions

Viability:The decision to discontinue the Novell Vibe Cloud service in July 2011 has left Novell with a dent in

its credibility and no SaaS offering, except for hosted versions offered by partners. Novell needs to work

quickly to revitalize the remaining Novell Vibe product and to improve visibility beyond its customer base and

beyond IT buyers.

Ecosystem:Despite fostering developer communities through an open-source edition for some time,

contributions to the product in terms of plug-ins, extensions and enhancements have been limited.

Customer experience:Customers on older versions of Novell Vibe complained about lack of usability and

difficulties with customization.

OpenText

OpenText, a Challenger in this year's Magic Quadrant, is an established enterprise content management vendor

with customers in financial services, government, utilities, media and healthcare. The company has expanded its

product breadth with its OpenText Social Communities and OpenText Social Workplace applications, which

provide social software capability for internal associates and external customers and users.

Strengths

Viability:OpenText is financially stable and has a sound level of revenue and an installed base of customers

on which it can build to expand its social software market presence.

Integration:OpenText Social Communities and OpenText Social Workplace can benefit from integration

with OpenText's Content Server, which provides records management and content library services.

Scalability:The company has reference customers in industries such as government and utilities that

support large user populations, and a tiered licensing model based on the number of CPUs that encourages

deployments to large user bases.

Cautions

Focus:Although OpenText has made recent investments in platform rationalization around several social

software offerings, these represent only a relatively small percentage of its overall revenue. It needs to do

more to build its presence and credibility in this market.

Vision:OpenText's holistic vision centered on content management may not be appropriate for some use

cases, or for companies already committed to alternatives for their content management needs.

Product road map:OpenText's product portfolio has been built up over time mainly through acquisition,

leading to overlapping product lines and potential for confusion about which product to use for a specific

situation.

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Saba

Saba is positioned as a Challenger because of its strong financial position, large global enterprise and public-

sector customer base and product road maps. Its offerings span collaboration, Web conferencing, e-learning and

human capital management.

Strengths

Viability:Saba is an established public company with more than 700 employees, a strong partner program

and a global presence.

Innovation:Saba offers native mobile clients and YouTube-like rich-media content organization that

includes video, Web conferencing recordings and a "dynamic people profile" that combines social tagging

with formal accreditations to identify experts. Expertise is tracked informally by the user or community, or

managed formally by other Saba business applications. Saba offers a public and private cloud delivery

model with multiple data centers around the world.

Strategy:Saba has put together a comprehensive offering. It has done this by combining the strength of

Saba Centra for real-time online collaboration and conferencing with asynchronous collaboration and

business networking from Saba Social in a unified collaboration offering. Leveraging Saba's existing

presence in many organizations in adjacent e-learning and performance management markets could give

Saba an advantage over other social software vendors.

Cautions

Focus:Saba is a leader in the corporate learning systems and talent management market, but is continuing

to establish itself as a major player in the social software and collaboration market.

Functionality:It offers limited document authoring and limited browser previewing of shared documents.

Some functionality requires optional apps beyond Saba Social (for example, transcoding is available via

Saba Centra).

Customer experience:Reference customers using the 2010 version of Saba Social reported some

integration difficulties with other Saba modules (though Saba claims to have addressed these issues in the

2011 release).

salesforce.com

Salesforce.com is in the Visionaries' quadrant. Chatter is used for employee networking, knowledge sharing

(especially concerning sales and customer support activities), executive communications and idea capture/

discussion.

Strengths

Integration:Although many organizations can benefit from using Chatter as a self-contained networking

tool, its value increases when used in combination with salesforce.com's other business applications. When

this happens, business events such as contract updates or customer interactions appear in activity streams

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to be discussed or "followed." Conversely, conversations, responses or ideas are easily accessible from

within the relevant business records. Following the company's acquisition of Dimdim, integration with real-

time chat and presence services is expected soon.

Vision:The company is positioning Chatter not only as a self-contained collaboration/networking application

(for both internal and external use), but also as a horizontal social services layer. This layer can provide

dynamic profiles, preferences, connections, social metadata and general social context services to other

salesforce.com applications and custom applications, and to partner applications on its Force.com platform.

Strategy:Salesforce.com is a relatively late entrant into the collaboration and networking market and is

investing heavily to build up its core product, as well as in marketing to increase its market presence. At least

for now, it is promoting a free service to Chatter.com that is available to non-salesforce.com customers as

well.

Cautions

Focus:Chatter is positioned primarily for general communications and networking. Structured collaboration

or general-purpose project activities are less well supported, unless they happen around the core account

management capabilities of the salesforce.com applications.

Functionality:Chatter is still evolving and, despite some very welcome features (such as a desktop client for

rich activity feeds and file upload/sink, native mobile clients and rich profiles), it does have some significant

weaknesses. These include very limited authoring/wiki capabilities that require Visualforce tools for

developers, limited document handling for preview or conversion into editable formats, no preintegration with

other platforms except through general APIs, and limited social analytics for recommendations, social search

and filtering.

Customer experience:Customer feedback has generally been positive one organization with tens of

thousands of users said: "Chatter has changed the game and is altering the way our workforce operates."

However, despite early signs of success as a networking tool, there is no track record yet of Chatter beingused as a general-purpose collaboration tool supporting structured tasks, ongoing projects or formal

communities.

Socialtext

Socialtext is in the Visionaries' quadrant. It has a comprehensive set of collaboration and social capabilities and

is used for internal collaboration, information sharing and networking.

Strengths

Functionality:Socialtext was one of the early vendors in the social software space and its product has a

broad range of capabilities, including social spreadsheets, open social support, faceted search and dynamicprofiles.

Vision:Socialtext was one of the first vendors to position its product as a "social layer" for providing profiles,

activity feeds, personalization and general "social context" to other applications through Socialtext Connect.

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Integration:Socialtext offers preintegration with SharePoint, with salesforce.com, with a desktop client for

rich activity feeds and file integration, and with the WordPress blogging engine and the Bugzilla issue-

tracking engine, as well as a rich integration framework to other business applications.

Cautions

Ecosystem:Socialtext has a growing number of partners, as well as an active private developer community(SocialDev). However, given that it was one of the first vendors to enter this market, Socialtext needs to do

more with value-added partners to keep up with its peers.

Viability:Socialtext is still a small organization with fewer than 100 employees and it needs to continue to

build its reputation as an enterprise vendor.

Customer experience:Although we received generally positive feedback praising the flexibility of the

product and the technical competence of the organization, one reference customer pointed to growing pains

in the postsales organization.

SuccessFactorsSuccessFactors is in the Visionaries' quadrant. SuccessFactors CubeTree is used for employee communication,

project collaboration, and skill/expertise tracking and reporting as part of overall performance management.

Strengths

Strategy:SuccessFactors CubeTree is offered both separately and as part of the SuccessFactors Business

Execution (BizX) Software suite targeting mainly HR buyers. CubeTree is used for expertise tracking,

recruitment and onboarding, informal learning and employee engagement. SuccessFactors' recent

acquisition of Plateau Systems, a learning management systems vendor, has strengthened its overall

strategy of combining specific people-centric applications with a social collaboration platform.

Innovation:Its broad set of capabilities includes several innovative features, such as: the conversion of

Microsoft Office documents and PDF files to a "social document" format that can be displayed, edited or

discussed in a browser; rich profiles with dozens of attributes (including "kudos" badges); native mobile

applications that also support social documents; activity feeds with private messaging; and rich media/video

content authoring (through the recent acquisition of Jambok).

Customer experience:Feedback from customers has been positive. Respondents praised the product's

usability, which they compared favorably with consumer social networking services, saying that this

contributed to rapid viral adoption among users.

Cautions

Focus:The focus on social collaboration as part of the BizX suite may be attractive to those ready to commit

to such a suite. But, so far, CubeTree users are predominantly those who bought it as part of the overall

suite.

Ecosystem:Although SuccessFactors has a broad and active partner ecosystem, CubeTree does not have

an external independent developer community or a third-party add-on/extension marketplace.

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Strategy:We rate SuccessFactors' overall strategy positively, but CubeTree's market traction and visibility

are still limited.

Telligent

Telligent is in the Visionaries' quadrant. Telligent Community is used for creating branded customer, partner or

prospect communities. Telligent Enterprise is used for employee communities, as well as for project and team

collaboration.

Strengths

Ecosystem:Apart from more than two dozen service partners, Telligent has an active third-party

marketplace, as well as an application partner network that includes some partners that offer custom

solutions on top of the Telligent platform (such as Limeade for employee health and weListen for innovation

management).

Functionality:Telligent Enterprise includes a broad range of capabilities for document sharing, rich editing,

full email integration, seven types of user profiles, sophisticated analytics and a recommendation engine.However, mobile support is only via mobile browser optimization, rather than via native applications.

Viability:Gartner estimates that, in 2010, Telligent's revenue grew by 30%, to approximately $17 million

overall.

Cautions

Strategy:Despite its growth, Telligent may not have the existing relationships and installed base of

customers for potential cross-selling that larger competitors with broader product portfolios have in this

space.

Customer experience:Reference feedback was positive overall, with praise for its products and user

experience, consistency and "hyperconfigurability." However, some pointed to lapses in support

responsiveness and long upgrade cycles. Telligent has outlined specific organizational and process

improvements it has made to address these issues.

Architecture:The company has strong ties to Microsoft technologies, including Microsoft .NET and SQL

Server. This may limit its appeal to organizations that do not rely on Microsoft architecture.

XWiki

XWiki is in the Niche Players' quadrant. XWiki is an open-source product with a foothold in the enterprise market

where it is used primarily for social intranets, information sharing, project collaboration, and collaboration

regarding technical reference libraries.

Strengths

Ecosystem:XWiki benefits from a large developer community that has already contributed hundreds of

extensions and plug-ins (see extensions.xwiki.org).

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Focus:The focus of XWiki on use cases involving collaborative intranets, collaborative authoring and

document repositories has helped it to address an important need between collaboration and document

management. Its flexible macro language helps more technical customers to customize the deployment to fit

their needs more effectively.

Customers:Customer references reported positively on: ease of use; transparency and efficiency as a result

of peer comments in the open-source communities; the ability to structure arbitrary content through user

metadata; collaborative authoring; and the responsiveness of the XWiki organization.

Cautions

Viability:The XWiki organization is growing its revenue and customers from a very small base. The

availability of the complete product with an open-source license acts as a marketing tool and helps to attract

third-party developers. However, a business model that relies only on optional support and hosting revenue

needs a large customer base to become sustainable. XWiki needs a larger market presence to achieve this.

Strategy:The availability of new cloud options is positive, but more needs to be done to make the product

appealing to buyers beyond IT and to satisfy larger organizations about XWiki's ability to support them.

Functionality:Despite its strengths in document authoring and sharing, XWiki has several weaknesses in

dynamic profiles, native mobile applications, social analytics, sophisticated activity feeds, recommendations

and people search.

Note 1 How We Calculated Cloud Revenue

We calculated the cloud revenue percentage as the weighted average of the percentage of revenue reported as

coming from cloud deployments using the absolute total revenue of each vendor as the weight.

Note 2 How We Calculated Pricing

We based our pricing calculations on responses from 20 of the 22 vendors in this Magic Quadrant to a question

on list pricing for a deployment to 5,000 users over three years that meets all the functional criteria for products.

These figures may change because of further discounts, additional functionality, redundancy and fault tolerance,

hosting, capacity, services and terms of use. Although we hope that these figures will provide general guidelines

on pricing trends, they should not be relied on for strict comparisons.

Vendors Added or Dropped

We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants and MarketScopes as markets

change. As a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant orMarketScope may change over time. A vendor appearing in a Magic Quadrant or MarketScope one

year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we have changed our opinion of that

vendor. This may be a reflection of a change in the market and, therefore, changed evaluation

criteria, or a change of focus by a vendor.

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Evaluation Criteria Definitions

Ability to Execute

Product/Service:Core goods and services offered by the vendor that compete in/serve the defined

market. These include current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets and skills, whether

offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the market definition and

detailed in the subcriteria.

Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial, Strategy, Organization):Viability includes an

assessment of the overall organization's financial health, the financial and practical success of the

business unit, and the likelihood that the individual business unit will continue investing in the

product, will continue offering the product and will advance the state of the art within the

organization's portfolio of products.

Sales Execution/Pricing:The vendor's capabilities in all presales activities and the structure that

supports them. These include deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales support and the

overall effectiveness of the sales channel.

Market Responsiveness and Track Record:Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and

achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and

market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor's history of responsiveness.

Marketing Execution:The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver

the organization's message to influence the market, promote the brand and business, increase

awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification with the product/brand andorganization in the minds of buyers. This mind share can be driven by a combination of publicity,

promotional initiatives, thought leadership, word-of-mouth and sales activities.

Customer Experience:Relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients to be

successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways customers receive

technical support or account support. This can also include ancillary tools, customer support

programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups, SLAs and so on.

Operations:The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include the

quality of the organizational structure, including skills, experiences, programs, systems and other

vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis.

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Completeness of Vision

Market Understanding:Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs and to

translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision listen to

and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance those with their added vision.

Marketing Strategy:A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicated throughout

the organization and externalized through the website, advertising, customer programs and

positioning statements.

Sales Strategy:The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate network of direct and

indirect sales, marketing, service and communication affiliates that extend the scope and depth of

market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the customer base.

Offering (Product) Strategy:The vendor's approach to product development and delivery that

emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets as they map to current and

future requirements.

Business Model:The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business proposition.

Vertical/Industry Strategy:The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet

the specific needs of individual market segments, including vertical markets.

Innovation:Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or

capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.

Geographic Strategy:The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the

specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, either directly or through

partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that geography and market.

2011Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates. This publicationmay not be reproduced or distributed in any form without Gartners prior written permission. The information contained in this publication hasbeen obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of suchinformation and shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in such information. This publication consists of the opinions ofGartners research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. The opinions expressed herein are subject to changewithout notice. Although Gartner research may include a discussion of related legal issues, Gartner does not provide legal advice or servicesand its research should not be construed or used as such. Gartner is a public company, and its shareholders may include firms and fundsthat have financial interests in entities covered in Gartner research. Gartners Board of Directors may include senior managers of these firmsor funds. Gartner research is produced independently by its research organization without input or influence from these firms, funds or theirmanagers. For further information on the independence and integrity of Gartner research, see Guiding Principles on Independence andObjectivity on its website, http://www.gartner.com/technology/about/ombudsman/omb_guide2.jsp.
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Documents

Gartner 2011 MQ Social Software in the Workplace