Magic Quadrant 2010 for Internal Social Software

Gartner released its 2010 Magic Quadrant for Workplace Social Software report this week. The same five vendors held onto the Leaders and Challengers quadrants, while the Visionaries and Niche Players quadrants thinned out. IBM, Jive and Microsoft remained the “Leaders” and Atlassian and OpenText remained the “Challengers.” Several vendors dropped off the list completely. XWiki, a “Niche Player,” was the only completely new vendor to make the cut.

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For comparison, here’s last year’s quadrant:

Criteria

Part of the reason so many vendors were dropped this year was a change in the criteria. Gartner now requires vendors provide four “references.” The reference organizations must have the vendor’s product deployed to at least 5,000 employees and be willing to talk to Gartner about the product.

The other criteria are:

• Focus on internal teams – as opposed to externally facing social software
• General purpose – not for specific business processes or verticals
• Market presence – at least 15 different customers, at least 100,000 active seats total across all customers

Gartner also required all products to include the following functions:

• user management
• user profiles
• roles and access control
• configurable group, project, team or community areas
• document sharing
• discussion forums
• blogs
• wikis

The Big Winner: Jive

Jive is the big winner here, holding onto its Leadership position in this report, as well as Magic Quadrant for Externally Facing Social Software 2010 and Magic Quadrant for Social CRM 2010. The company is offering complementary copies of these reports here.

Jive was also chosen as a leader in The Forrester Wave: Community Platforms Q1 2009 report (the most recent report of its kind), but trailed IBM and Microsoft in The Forrester Wave: CollaborationPlatforms Q3 2009 report, ranking as a “Strong Performer.” Likewise, Info-Tech listed Jive as a “Vangaurd” vendor in its Vendor Landscape: Collaboration Platforms report.

Insurgents: Saba and Telligent

Most companies that didn’t drop out of the listing mearly held onto their existing rankings, or improved slightly. However, Saba and Telligent improved significantly and are inching their way into better quadrants.

Telligent is close to the “Leader” quadrant thanks to its fast growth and excellent analytics capabilities. Its focus has historically been on external communities and it’s still improving its internal capabilities, according to the report. The company appeared along side Jive in the Community Platforms Wave report from Forrester, and as a visionary in external social software in the Gartner report.

Saba is a well established player in the corporate learning systems market, but is still building awareness for its enterprise collaboration software. The company is on its way out of the Niche Players quadrant and into the Challengers quadrant.

Sleeper: OpenText

OpenText, Canada’s largest software vendor, stayed fairly still this year. Despite a lack of buzz, OpenText landed a “Champion” position along with Microsoft in the Info-Tech report. Info-Tech wrote that OpenText’s Social Workplace “provides a collaboration product in the workplace that is as intuitive as the collaboration tools employees use at home.”

Gartner notes that buyers and initiative leaders are failing to take usability and user experience into account when considering systems – which may explain why Sharepoint remains the dominant player and OpenText gets less attention. Gartner notes that a lack of usability hampers adoption and increases training costs.

The New Kid: XWiki

XWiki was the only completely new player added this year, though Gartner also added NewsGator, which acquired Tomoye, and SuccessFactors, which acquired CubeTree.

XWiki is a small French vendor of an open-source wiki-focused enterprise collaboration product.

Dropped This Year

Several vendors got dropped this year, thinning out the quadrant significantly. Those dropped were:

• Blogtronix
• Central Desktop
• CustomerVision
• EMC
• eTouch
• FatWire Solutions
• Google
• Leverage Software
• MindTouch
• Mzinga
• Neighborhood America (now known as INgage Networks)
• PBworks
• Siteforum

Notable Absences

Gartner noted several absent vendors that were still worthy of consideration. Salesforce.com’s Chatter and Yammer were among them.

Gartner also mentioned solutions from mega-vendors Cisco and Oracle. Notably absent from the report was SAP‘s StreamWork.

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