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Gartner Magic Quadrant on Social Software in the Workplace

Gartner recently published the 2011 Magic Quadrant on Social Software in the Workplace. Not surprisingly, the market leaders are IBM, Jive and Microsoft.Gartner Magic Quadrant for 2011 Social Software

Gartner views IBM’s size and product breadth as major contributions to its ranking. Also, IBM Connections has many, many large implementations under its belt. IBM’s challenges come from the complexity of installing and integrating all their various systems.

Jive is considered a leader for its innovative features and strong partnerships. Jive also has several larger implementations and has recently been pushing its integration with SharePoint. On the downside, Gartner has some concerns about Jive’s size.

Obviously, Microsoft’s size is not a problem. Gartner really likes Microsoft’s product line, and their ease of integration. But Gartner really likes SharePoint’s future possibilities due to its recent popularity in the enterprise space.

How does Gartner’s research compare to Forrester’s? Forrester lists IBM, Jive, Telligent and NewsGator as their leaders. You can see Forrester’s Wave in my previous blog post.

For comparison sake, I’ve included a picture of the Magic Quadrant from 2010.  You can see that IBM, Jive, and Microsoft were the only leaders then as well.  Oh by the way, all three were leaders on 2009 too.  So the leaders continue to lead and the others continue to try to Gartner Magic Quadrant for 2010catch up.

Thoughts on “Gartner Magic Quadrant on Social Software in the Workplace”

  1. Always depends on the definition. I don’t see how Microsoft is even in the magic quadrant with all of the additional 3d party software and additional software you have to buy to equal IBM Connections/w Domino-xpages… When I compare MS Exchange w/Sharepoint to IBM Connections / Domino-xpages – Point by point, the MS stack is found “wanting”!!! Just does not compare

  2. Let me declare before that i work in Big Blue, but very frankly, as a tech user/consumer there is a topic – and this is a personal opinion supported by facits – i really do not understand: how a document management platform as Sharepoint can be classified as “Social Software for the Workplace”. Whoever has used Sharepoint (i did) can understand that one thing is to upload a document into a container (and duplocating it if you want to share it among different “communities”. Another thing is to share artifacts between people, communities, acttivities and socialize a content (even a document, in the last unique version everywhere) with one click, from everyplace even in mobility, inside/outside of the company, and integrating these capabilities within orhet applicazions like PLM, ERP’s, ECM and so on. That’s social for me, and is what Connections do out of the box. More and mode Sharepoint customer are putting Connections over sharepoint to socialize it, and avoid long/costly customization projects (that do not resolve the problem of duplicating stuff…). May i suggest to the analytsts to take a look to this video? It explains the difference between File management and Social file management… Thanks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5sgSZqsmtA

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Mark Polly

Mark Polly is Perficient's Chief Strategist for Customer Experience Platforms. He works to create great customer, partner, and employee experiences. Mark specializes in web content management, portal, search, CRM, marketing automation, customer service, collaboration, social networks, and more.

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