We’ve written many articles on this blog about the importance of Activity Streams, mostly in conjunction with social software. Forrester recently released the first research report dedicated to just Activity Streams. To be included in the research, Forrester said the product had to specialize in activity streams as opposed to being a platform.
Initially this struck me as kind of odd. Standalone activity steam software? Well in fact it really makes a lot of sense when you can integrate other systems into the activity stream. I’ve often thought that activity streams would make a great “alerting” mechanism for lots of non-social systems. For example, if you want to alert a sales person that a customer just placed an order, just throw that out to the activity stream. The sales people who are interested in that customer have subscribed to the activity stream and will see that alert. But many of the ‘platform’ activity streams tend to require a lot of other software that you may not want.
So who is in this Forrester Wave? Five products qualified for inclusion in the report:
- Yammer by Yammer
- Chatter by Salesforce.com
- Tibbr by Tibco
- SocialCast by VMware
- Neudesic Pulse by Neudesic
The Leaders include Yammer, Chatter and Tibbr. The other products are listed as Strong Contenders.
Yammer and Chatter are both cloud solutions. Chatter, of course, aims to take advantage of all those Salesforce.com users. Forrester mentions that Yammer’s direction is to remain platform agnostic. With the recent news of Microsoft buying Yammer, we’ll have to see how that goes.
Tibbr and SocialCast want to play in the integration space. Forrester says, “Both offer multiple delivery options as well as strong standalone social functionality, but they really shine on-premises where they can fully exploit integration with existing line-of-business applications.”
Neudesic focuses on the Microsoft market. Again with Microsoft planning to buy Yammer, we’ll have to see how Neudesic reacts to those plans.
