Cisco Quad vs Jive

In the light of the recent HP story, it's interesting to watch what's happening in another IT giant - Cisco. Like HP, Cisco was built on manufacturing computer hardware. The peak success of the company came in the early 2000's when Cisco passed Microsoft and became the most valuable company in the world. It was then called "the company that is building the Internet" because more than 80% of routers in the Internet were manufactured by Cisco. But then the company became the victim of it's own success.

Following the release of the business-oriented tablet, Cisco has invaded another new for them Enterprise 2.0 sphere - today the company announced the availability of the cloud platform Cisco Hosted Collaboration. However, the platform is very specialized - it's intended only for hosting of Cisco's solutions: Cisco Unified Communications, Cisco Telepresence, Cisco Unified Contact Center and Cisco Quad. And the hosted applications will be managed not by the customers themselves and not by Ciscom but by Cisco's partners. The platform will provide partners with a virtualized environment where they can quickly install multiple application instances on single server and offer them to multiple customers. Of course, this scheme will make Cisco's solution implementations less expensive and long-term, and will allow the partners to provide a subscription model.

It's not a secret that the iPad has no camera, because Steve Jobs hopes to collect another $1K from his loyal customers for this feature in next version. And most likely, he would succeed in the consumer market, but the enterprise market is now a big question. Because mobile videoconferencing - is the main advantage of such tablets over netbooks and smartphones for business. And because today Cisco introduced its tablet Cisco Cius, targeted directly at web-conferencing and business video applications. First of all - Cisco business apps: Webex, Quad, Cisco Telepresence. But since the device is running Android OS - it is open for solutions from any vendor.

Finally, the customer service sphere is gaining attention and attracting the leading enterprise vendors. Recently, Salesforce came up with SaaS helpdesk-app Desk.com and now the Social Software champion - Jive - is presenting its own helpdesk solution Jive Customer Service. And of course, it's social, i.e. the front-end of the system is a customer community where users can communicate not only with support agents, but also with other users. And due to the fact that users get answers from experienced customers or find them in the community, the load on the support tems is greatly reduced. In addition to the social component, Jive also partnered with Gamification champion Bunchball to implement game mechanics into the system. It provides different ratings and badges helping to engage customers into the community.

Leading social software vendors Yammer, Jive, NewsGator updated their products and showed us the latest trends, transforming the corporate social networks. Yammer has released the desktop AIR-client (Win and Mac), added the ability to post videos in microblog posts, reward colleagues with badges for completed tasks (we have already seen such gamification in Rypple and Producteev), and realized the integration with NetSuite, reminding the bunch Salesforce + Chatter. NewsGator in its new version of NewsGator Social Sites 2 focused on improving the Sharepoint video capabilities (recall, Newsgator Social Sites works on top of the Sharepoint). Like in Yammer, videos can now be easily inserted into microblog messages and besides they are added to the video gallery (something like YouTube for the Enterprise) where all the social capabilities can also be utilized - comments, rating, likes:

Jive is the champion on the enterprise social software market, and regarding the social functions (creating social connections, customer engagement, integrating the intranet with Facebook and Twitter) - it's the best of breed solution. But document collaboration tools in Jive leave much to be desired. Therefore, Jive is often used as a social layer in combination with Sharepoint or other collaboration solutions. But of course, Jive wants to fill this gap. Today Jive has acquired OffiSync - the document collaboration service. Recall, OffiSync - is a plugin + service, which allows almost real time collaboration on MS Office documents using Google Docs as the synchronization point. Recently, Google has released almost similar (and free) service Google Cloud Connect that could take OffiSync out of the market, so Jive's acquisition - is a great outlet for the start-up. Especially taking into account the price tag - $25-30 million.

Gartner has published the Magic Quadrant for enterprise Social Software market 2010. In the previous similar report in 2009 the MQ reminded the Brownian movement of molecules because of the large number of vendors and approaches to the enterprise social tools. That's why Gartner decided to clarify its approach. At first, they split the Social Software for internal and external. The external was defined as Social CRM - and moved to the separate report. And this Magic Quadrant is focused only on internal social tools, designed for collaboration within enterprise. Additionally in order to mute the noise, Gartner introduced several restrictions. First, each vendor should have at least 100,000 end users. Second, each product should include the following social tools:

At least since the previous year experts are talking about Social CRM, as of the most promising technology on the large CRM market. Now, these talks have the official confirmation - Gartner has published the Social CRM Magic Quadrant (as a rule, such reports are only created for the largest markets). According to the report, 80% of the CRM market growth in 2010 is due to the Social CRM development and the total investments in the social CRM in the next year will reach $1 billion. So what is social CRM? Gartner refers the following technologies to this concept: social Web monitoring, fetching contact information from social media, customer/partner community management, collecting feedback and ideas from customers. According to the report, Social CRM market leaders are Jive SBS and Lithium. Both solutions do not contain traditional CRM functionality, but rather, are designed for integration with traditional CRM. Salesforce, thanks to the release of Chatter, Ideas and acquiring Jigsaw, managed to get only into Visionaries section. Note the absence of startups in the Challengers section - it promises good opportunities for those who will decide to enter this market now.

Social Software adopts consumer web achievements (wikis, blogs, profiles, tags, ratings, social connections, people search, micro-blogging) in the enterprise environment. Of course, today almost all software vendors say that their software provides social computing, but in most cases it's only PR pitches and their software is not really social. At the same time there are few "native social software" solutions, that provide a social layer for company intranet and really enable it to achieve the social software objectives: create enterprise-wide community and improve collaboration. The most successful on this market are 3 solutions: Jive SBS, SocialText and NewsGator Social Sites.

Gartner has presented the second Magic Quadrant report for Enterprise Social Software market. Since last year 3 companies have appeared in the Leaders section, that was empty in the previous report: Microsoft (Sharepoint), IBM (Lotus Connections, Quickr, WebSphere Portal) and Jive Software (SBS). They are challenged  by Atlassian (Confluence) and Open Text that earlier this year unveiled the social module for it's ECM platform - Social Workplace. Not far from it - the main competitor on the ECM market - EMC (Documentum). We also note the stealth appearance in the Magic Quadrant of Google with its revolutionary products Google Wave and Google Buzz. In general, the social software market in the eyes of Gartner analysts still looks like a Brownian motion of unclear vendors.