Analysts have recently released reports on vendors providing online subscriptions for social business software. This post takes a look at their findings and the factors that influence decisions

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A summary presentation of this post has been uploaded to Slideshare and is embedded below

Gartner recently released a magic quadrant for social software in the workplace:

The usual suspects dominate the leaders quadrant, with Microsoft claiming double thanks to the recent acqusition of Yammer. The choice of niche players is interesting since most target specific social applications (media-related rather than process-related). Social software in the workplace ought to accomodate a more broader range. And the leaders are predominantly platforms that the niche players would need for certain elements of their solution, namely the ability to send emails…

Gartner has also recently released a separate magic quadrant for social CRM:​

You wonder if it makes sense to have separate quadrants, as the worlds of CRM tools and collaborative workspaces appear to be merging. Recent announcements at the Dreamforce conference would suggest that Salesforce.com has the likes of SharePoint, Yammer, Box and Jive firmly in its sights.

Forrester recently released their wave for cloud platforms for online collaboration and do expand a little beyond the social media play with Box joining the leaders. But the choice of vendors is also a bit odd – Cisco has a range of products and services that fit various scenarios, but currently do not have a cohesive approach to match the others and Citrix? Possibly snuck in with the acquisition of Podio but would question its position on that basis.​

How useful is this research if you’re considering a move to online social business software? A little maybe but not a lot.  Analysis only really matters when it predicts an unexpected outcome. Beyond that, it is more than likely to be used to justify a decision already made.

There are five factors that are pivotal to a decision to use any of the online software vendors listed by the analysts:

1. Do you already have a preferred vendor?
2. Platform or specific scenario?
3. Intended life span?
4. Size matters
5. Do prices matter?

1. Preferred platform vendor?

If you already have a preferred vendor for information work, you’re more likely to stick with what you know because it should mean lower costs for training, content migration and disruption. Deciding to change would indicate a major shift in strategy that is worthy of a blog post on its own. Unsurprisingly, the traditional mainstream vendors for collaborative working (Microsft, IBM-Lotus) are agressively targeting cloud computing scenarios to prevent this from happening.

However, the shift to online and mobile working may justify shifting strategies for some organisations… Complicating the matter these days is cross-platform device support. Whilst many organisations may use Microsoft or IBM as the platform for collaborative working, their employees are increasingly likely to be using other vendors’ devices, namely Apple iAnything and Google Android. Your mobile strategy should play a part in any decisions regarding online service platform vendors.

2. Platform vs specific scenario?

Gartner has separate quadrants for social business and social CRM and Forrester describes a wave covering online collaboration software. These are incredibly broad categories spanning content management, communications, search, forms-based processes, business intelligence… There are few vendors targeting all those scenarios at once, so your options are immediately limited if you want them all.

However if you are dabbling in the world of online social software and have a specific immediate need, then a niche solution is likely to be quicker to deploy and more useful for a limited set of people. This can cause complications in the future, if the solution is successful and needs to either be rolled out to everyone or replaced with a platform-based alternative (likely if the original solution can’t scale). However, such concerns are often over-estimated in advance. Trying to figure out how to scale-out a successful application is a good problem to have.

There is another category that fits between broad platform and specific scenario: enterprise applications. Enterprise applications aren’t strictly platforms because they rarely integrate easily with other services but often scale to a size comparible with any platform and that dominates any niche alternatives. In the social business space, the prime example is Salesforce.com. Salesforce started out focused on CRM but has expanded into service desk management, instant communications and recently announced adding file-sharing and collaborative capabilities. That’s a platform in the making.

3. Intended Lifespan

The obvious question is: what’s the expected lifespan of the vendor? If they are a new entrant, will they still be around in 12 months time? What if they are acquired by Microsoft and your standard platform vendor is IBM or Oracle? (and vice versa). We are talking about online services – if the data is stored ‘in the cloud’, what happens if the vendor goes bust? Do you get any warning to recover your data before the service is shut down?

It is fair to say that the mainstream vendors are unlikely to disappear overnight, even if they themselves occasionally shut down some of their products as their own strategies shift. For everyone else, who knows? The first question to ask is: What’s the anticipated or intended lifespan of the deployment? Treating the deployment as a trial or experiment will have a very different expected lifespan to rolling out a platform for all users to be migrated to.

4. Size Matters

The organisations with the most to benefit from emerging trends are always the biggest and the smallest. See related post: Who wants to be in the middle? But size also matters when deciding on an online software vendor. Has the application or platform been tested or proven to scale to meet the needs of your organisation?

If you look at the case studies for niche softeware vendors, they will often include brand names. They will rarely (never) say what percentage of the organisation are actively using the software. Large organisations are usually the ones with budgets to experiment with trials and limited deployments for small teams. If you are taking a bet on a niche or challenger software vendor, first run a trial for a group-size comparible with the user base the solution is intended for. It’s not just performance to be concerned with. Many features that look fantastic in a limited demonstration simply don’t maintain effective functionality beyond a certain team size.

5. Do prices matter

Moving to online services means moving to recurring subscription mode. Subscriptions are obviously not the total cost of the deployment but, as is the nature of online subscriptions, they are ongoing and charged monthly for the duration of the deployment. The table below outlines some of the prices, from data available at the time of writing

To summarise, the niche scenarios are priced very similar to the mainstream platforms. However, in reality, the price is double for niche scenarios since they don’t include the basics of collaborative working – an email address. All the mainstream platforms include email services.  Spot the elephant pricing in the room – the enterprise application.

So how to choose an online service for social business?

To wrap up, here’s some guidelines when considering a move to online services for collaborative working. The following are our opinions based on research and hands-on experience and those opinions will change as the services continue to mature and evolve:

And the disclaimer – what do we use?

Joining Dots Ltd currently subscribes to four cloud platforms: Google Apps for Business, Microsoft Office 365, WordPress and DropBox. We use Google Apps for the basics: email, calendars and contacts. We use SharePoint Online (within Office 365) for the company intranet and internal processes due to its forms and workflow capabilities, with WordPress used for all public-facing web sites. We use DropBox for file synchronisation. For hardware, we predominantly use Apple devices.

References

• Gartner magic quadrant for social software image shared by Jive software
• Gartner magic quadrant for social CRM image shared by Forbes
• Forrester Wave: Cloud Strategies of Online Collaboration Software Vendors shared by Microsoft
• GigaOm: Why Amazon and Salesforce are pulling away from the cloud pack
• Pricing: Microsoft Office 365 plans
• Pricing: Salesforce.com plans
• Pricing: Google Apps plans
• Pricing: IBM Cloud Computing for Social Business (need to click Buy Online to access)
• Pricing: Jive Social Business Platform (from the Intranet page, but single price applies to all solutions)
• Pricing: Box
• Pricing: Igloo Intranet​

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This article was original published on www.joiningdots.com