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.

The company of the future - is a social network that includes employees, customers, partners, market experts, and the crowd of the web. All them are engaged in the business - discuss problems, share ideas and contribute their knowledge. Such company has no exact borders - it exists as an organic part of the market. That is why its product always meet expectations. But how to involve external contributors to the corporate community? It's not necessary any more. Let them communicate where they like. You just need to unite the internal corporate network with the global Social Web. That's the central idea of Jive Market Engagement - the new service of Jive (the leading Social Software vendor).