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October 25, 2012

MarketScape 2012 Isolates VMware's Socialcast and Yammer as Exceptional Enterprise Social Software Providers

By David Gitonga, TMCnet Contributing Writer

International Data Corporation (IDC (News - Alert)) has released the 2012 edition of its MarketScape report that profiles and ranks prominent worldwide enterprise social software providers. The publication indicates that as the uses of social software matures and widens, organizations are engaging customers in conversations both on the inside and on the outside of their firewalls.



This growth has made the heavy knowledge transactions observed on activity streams, blogs, wikis and discussion forums a normal thing. Enterprises are harnessing the power of letting their customers express their view to collect information necessary in service delivery improvement and sell specialization optimization.

Further, the IDC MarketScape 2012 report explores the offerings and prospects of 18 vendors’ capabilities after a detailed criteria evaluation through factors that IDC identified as core to vendor success in the enterprise social software market. Those who took part in the sample analysis include BlueKiwi, Mzinga, SAP, Socialtext, Telligent and Yammer (News - Alert).

With the social business scene exhibiting fast changes in the adoption of use cases, technology and attitudes, the social field is soon bound to become the ultimate customer and engagement channel of choice for many enterprises. Some of the specific fields in which use cases have grown include the customer experience, sales enablement, digital commerce, socialytics and innovation management.

MarketScape’s methodology pinpointed Socialcast from VMware and Yammer as the big fish in the industry with Salesforce.com’s (News - Alert) Chatter closely trailing by as a major player. Other key players in the industry include Igloo Software, BlueKiwi, Huddle, Newsgator and Cisco (News - Alert) WebEx Social.

With IT being the bread and butter of the future, these findings ensure that the public gets the best of the best by providing a vendor analysis model to give an overview of the competitive placement of ICT providers in any specific market. The methodology uses a rigorous scoring approach built on qualitative and quantitative criteria, resulting in a single illustration of each player’s position in the market of study.

Vanessa Thompson, research manager for IDC’s Enterprise Social Network and Collaborative Technologies, believes that soon vendors will avail applications embedded within other applications. However, customers will in turn need to amalgamate and consolidate internal applications to support the change in the type of jobs that these social capabilities conjure.




Edited by Jamie Epstein
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