MindTouch vs Jive

(Aaron Fulkerson, MindTouch CEO)MindTouch - it an enterprise open source Wiki-platform, that grew out of the MediaWiki CMS. MindTouch is deployed by many large companies, including Microsoft, Fujitsu, Siemens, Intel, The Washington Post, and others. And Forrester recently called MindTouch the best alternative to Sharepoint and Lotus. But the most interesting is that MindTouch founder and CEO, Aaron Fulkerson - is an outspoken opponent of Social software, that most people now perceive as the main trend of Enterprise 2.0. He is confident that the main MindTouch competitors - SocialText and PBWiki - are going the wrong direction, adding more and more social tools to their wiki-systems. In contrast to enterprise Social Networks, Fulkerson invented a new concept - Collaborative Networks, and in accordance with this concept the MindTouch is developed.

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.