Social software suite of year: Jive SBS
The enterprise social media market heated up this year, with vendors like Cisco, Oracle and Salesforce.com jumping in. The onus was on Jive to defend its territory, and it did so. The company had a good year, garnering top spots in analyst reports and growing its customer base. As a Portlander, I was sad to see Jive move its official headquarters to Palo Alto, but it was a smart move that demonstrated seriousness on the part of the company.
At Enterprise 2.0 Santa Clara, CEO Tony Zingale took a notably aggressive tone with regards to competitors. Ellison-syndrome is pretty common among enterprise CEOs, but this posturing also suggests a shift towards more competitiveness in the enterprise 2.0 market. Jive enters 2011 well positioned, and its app store will bring many more tools to Jive users.
Honorable mention: Huddle Huddle was the breakout success of the year in this category. Started in London in 2007, Huddle opened a San Francisco office this year and started making waves in the U.S. market.
Social CRM product of the year: Salesforce.com
“Social CRM” remains a vague and confusing term. As Paul Greenberg writes, it’s used both as a umbrellla term for a set of strategies and technologies and as a term for a particular type of software that enables these strategies. Despite a lack of clarity about what it is, consultants and vendors alike are convinced that it’s “the future.” With many different components (monitoring, engagement, feedback, customer collaboration, employee collaboration, etc.), it can be hard to pick a stand-out vendor in the space. We settled on Salesforce.com not so much for the strength of its own tools, but for its ecosystem that is built on Force.com and available through App Exchange. Salesforce.com enables users to build a social CRM strategy based on the best tools from a number of vendors. Want to use Salesforce.com’s feedback, customer service and social media monitoring tools? Great. Want to use Get Satisfaction, Zendesk and Radian6 for those functions instead? You can do that, too.
Next year, as Jive’s app store matures, Salesforce.com will have more competition in this regard. But as of now, Salesforce.com is the platform to beat.
Honorable mention: SugarCRM SugarCRM offers most of Salesforce.com’s features, including various integrations and an app store, at a fraction of the cost. You won’t get Salesforce.com’s experience with hosting and scaling, but rest assured that SugarCRM handles many big-name customers. Plus, you have the option of hosting SugarCRM on-premise.
Microblogging tool of the year: Yammer
The enterprise microblogging space has been increasingly crowded, but Yammer has had an exceptionally good year. It closed a new round of funding, hit the 1 million user mark and is expanding the product into a full-blown social networking suite to compete with Jive. The move from being narrowly focused on providing a strong microblogging experience to providing a full array of social tools could make or break the company. In the meantime, it’s still the hottest enterprise microblogging vendor.
Honorable mention: Socialcast We were impressed with Reach, Socialcast‘s new tool for embedding itself into other applications. Like SimplyBox, this gives SocialCast the ability to be where users already work instead of creating a new destination.
Conferencing tool of the year: Skype
It may seem strange to think of Skype as an enterprise product, but it’s not just for chatting with your grandchildren anymore. This year Skype launched its business service Skype Connect, announced a partnership with Avaya and hired former Cisco executive Tony Bates as CEO. Bates’s last job title at Cisco was General Manager of Cisco’s Enterprise, Commercial and Small Business Division.
Most companies still rely on services like WebEx and GoToMeeting for Web conferencing. But Skype offers desktop sharing and conferencing abilities at a fraction of the cost and its voice and video services are premium quality. Don’t be surprised if you see more companies choosing Skype over other options in 2011.
Honorable mention: Adobe Connect Adobe Connect introduced some new features this year, notably the ability to write extensions. Adobe Connect has been praised by analyst firms like Gartner and Red Monk for its ease of use.
CMS of the year: Drupal
Drupal has now been the CMS powering the White House website for over a year. That’s about as good a test of a CMS as we can think of. According to Gartner, Drupal has a developer community over 600,000 developers strong. Acquia, the for-profit enterprise support company spun out of Drupal, has a customer list that ranges from Fox News to Mother Jones. Acquia raised an additional round of funding last month, leaving it well positioned for the coming year.
Honorable mention: MindTouch Another open-source CMS vendor, MindTouch, also had a great year. It released a new version that highlights curation and analytics, launched its marketplace for selling guides and documentation, landed Dachis as a customer and announced a partnership with Fujitsu.
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