Report: Community Platforms Market Led by Jive Software and Telligent
Forrester released a report today about the 'community platforms' market. They evaluated nine vendors, concluding that Jive Software and Telligent Systems "lead the pack because of their strong administrative and platform features." KickApps and Pluck were also commended, for enabling large Web sites to scale quickly with social features. Awareness, Lithium Technologies, and Mzinga were other products that Forrester liked, for enabling companies to build branded communities. We summarize the report below and highlight our own past coverage of Jive Software and Telligent.
Communities have been a staple of the web 2.0 era and over the past few years a lot of enterprise community products have come onto the market. The Forrester report, authored by Jeremiah Owyang, notes that even in this down economy there is still demand for online community platforms - because they are a cost-effective way for companies to market their products and reduce support costs. Overall, Forrester identified more than 90 vendors who offer community platforms and services - although Owyang notes that it's "still a very young market". 9 of the 90-odd were profiled in the report. They were: Awareness, Jive, KickApps, Leverage, Lithium, LiveWorld, Mzinga, Pluck, and Telligent.
Forrester singled out 2 vendors that are particularly strong: Jive Software and Telligent. The report noted that both have platforms that are easy to deploy and use.
Jive Software
Jive Software has a large customer base of more than 2,500 customers, including brands like Intel, Kraft Foods, and Nike. The report noted that Jive's user interface was "intuitive".
ReadWriteWeb has profiled Portland-based Jive Software a couple of times recently. Last April we reported on Jive's enterprise collaboration suite Clearspace. We noted that the service takes on Microsoft's Sharepoint with a feature set that looks like something many consumer software users would be envious of. At the time we thought that a USAToday quote was particularly apt: "Jive Software wants to be the Apple Computer of corporate social networks." In July 2008, we reported on ClearStep - an online community for businesses that we thought could deliver very real value to potential Jive customers.
We've also commented favorably in the recent past about Jive's promotion of XMPP (called Jabber in IM) - for powering communication services hosted in the cloud. The company included the first XMPP-powered document sharing and collaboration tool in the 2.0 release of its Clearspace.
Telligent
Dallas-based Telligent was commended by Forrester for its analytics features, because they "empower marketers to understand what's going on in their branded communities." Back in June, ReadWriteWeb noted that Telligent was one of a number of companies to offer integration with Microsoft SharePoint - perhaps the most-used collaboration platform in the enterprise. We noted that Telligent's Community Server Evolution platform uses its REST API, mail gateway, shared authentication and single sign-on, to integrate with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Microsoft Exchange Server, and Microsoft Active Directory.
Over on Jobwire, ReadWriteWeb's channel dedicated to news about job hires in the tech and media industry, we've also picked up on a couple of recent hires at Telligent. In November it hired former Microsoft Senior Research Sociologist Marc Smith, then in December it appointed former Palm CEO Carl Yankowski to its board of directors. So things appear to be going well for Telligent, even in the current economy.
Conclusion
One of the report's findings is that community platform providers must do more than offer a technology platform. Indeed Jeremiah Owyang says that "the technology is a commodity." The top providers, according to Forrester, "not only offer a strong technology platform but also provide services, support, and analytics offerings." Owyang elaborated that companies want "a solutions vendor that delivers strategy, education, services, community management, analytics and support - beyond just rss and discussion boards."
What the report didn't address was how relatively small vendors such as Jive and Telligent are competing against the likes of Microsoft SharePoint, IBM's Lotus SameTime and Lotus Connections, and even the open source software Drupal - which is very popular with developers in the enterprise. Check out Dion Hinchcliffe's top 10 list of community platforms for other options.
Update: Jeremiah Owyang notes in the comments to this post: "Some of the vendors you mention actually don't fit the use case that I was writing for: which is external communities for the interactive marketer -- NOT the internal intranet. Also, it's important to note that there is a clear difference between community software and collaboration software -- they are two different use cases." See also Jeremiah's blog post.
It's very hard to see how the enterprise community platform market can support 90 vendors, but we're pleased to see that innovative smaller companies like Jive and Telligent are footing it with the bigcos in this competitive landscape. Now please tell us which community platforms you use in your company and/or which ones have impressed you recently.
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Comments
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Richard
Thanks for covering the report, it was a labor of love, and we're happy it's going to help the market.
I've given more of my thoughts, shared the process (why some are not evaluated) on my blog post.
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/01/09/forrester-wave-community-platforms-2009/
Some of the vendors you mention actually don't fit the use case that I was writing for: which is external communities for the interactive marketer --NOT the internal intranet.
Also, it's important to note that there is a clear difference between community software and collaboration software --they are two different use cases.
I look forward to the discussion.
Thanks for the comment Jeremiah, I have updated the post with your notes about the different vendor and software types. Good points.
I did think though that SharePoint is software that tries to do both - community and collaboration. I'd be interested in peoples thoughts on that.
It seems clear that open source offerings such as those by Drupal, DotNetNuke, Joomla and the likes own this space. It's surprising these aren't marked in the pole positions.
@richard, IMHO, SharePoint is a platform that can be used to create community oriented solutions (with quite a bit of dev effort) as well as many other types of solutions. Its ongoing success in the market is primarily due to its rich platform capabilities (see the SharePoint "pie" described at http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/prodinfo/what.mspx) and growing partner (system integrators and solution developers) ecosystem. SharePoint was not built as a "community platform" and Microsoft isn't (or shouldn't be) positioning it as such. In short, SharePoint is a business productivity platform that can be customized and extended to support community oriented applications. And Telligent is one of the ISVs that provide community oriented value add to SharePoint. Some of the other ISVs are listed at http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/06/09/more-isv-partners-betting-on-sharepoint-server-2007-as-the-de-facto-enterprise-social-computing-platform.aspx.
Feel free to ping me anytime if you'd like a closer look at what Telligent is doing to ensure that we remain a leader in community platforms.
Lawrence Liu
Director of Platform Strategy, Telligent
(Former Senior Technical Product Manager for Social Computing, Microsoft SharePoint)
Richard:
Thanks for referencing the Forrester Wave report that LiveWorld was included in in the "Strong Performers" category. The executive summary of the report that you paraphrase in your first paragraph also notes that "LiveWorld offers brands agency-like services," something we believe is at the core of what we do.
We're thrilled that Forrester has included us in the Wave, which we think offers potential customers a good snapshot of the market and which vendors they might want to work with.
As you rightly note, too, building and growing strong communities is about far more than technology (Forrester says it's only 20%). The people/services part -- the planning and strategy, the community management, the relationship building, etc. -- is far more important in the long run.
Bryan Person | @BryanPerson
LiveWorld social media evangelist
I think Sharepoint does try to do both, to Richard's point -- but I can't think of a single example of a customer-facing community powered by Sharepoint. Good example of the difference between what a software is ostensibly capable of doing, and what companies actually do with it. Small-group collaboration has long been the sweet spot for the large ISVs like MSFT and IBM. The large-group stuff just has never became a focus for them.
To Aaron's point, it depends on what market segment you're looking at. In the Fortune 500, you'll be hard-pressed to find mature customer-facing implementations of Drupal, DotNetNuke, Joomla. Down to middle-market you see a bit more, small and SMB a lot more. Could be wrong. I'd love to see more examples if they are out there.
I thought the Wave report was good (my company, Lithium, is one of the companies profiled). I think for most large companies creating communities, you'll find your vendor among the nine. Worth reading the whole report, though. Picking a vendor is not a simple thing. To Bryan's point, we at Lithium focus more than any vendor on making sure you're successful (we got the highest score for Services), so if you value that you may choose us. At any rate, decide what's important to you, and use the report to help you decide.
Aaron Fulkerso
Do you have some industry level data to demonstrate how open source owns the space? I'd love to see.
This report (read my blog post carefully) isn't about technology. In fact, it's about the entire package that a vendor brings to a brand that includes services, support, strategy, editorial services, and analytics.
This is not to say that Opensource doesn't have it's place, but large brands want a solution partner that can deliver more than just a bunch of code.
We saw this same exact play happen with the CMS and Portal space about 10 years ago. While opensource CMS systems do exist, the Vignette, Documentum, Stellent, and others offer much, much more than technology to the enterprise.
For what it's worth, I evaluated the Acquia team, and had a meeting with them to discuss this, I assure you, we considered any vendor that had proprietary or opensource software as long as they brought forth solution offerings to enterprises.
Richard, thanks for updating the post.
Joe
Microsoft has shown me quite a few external facing sharepoint sites --you'd never know it was the case until you looked at the source code.
With that said, I gave an offer to Microsoft Sharepoint to submit to the wave, it was decided this wasn't the right use case, or they didn't have the resources to commit to the research effort.
In my experience, most client vendor selections for external communities end up steering away from Sharepoint, and once the business team gets a hold of the wave report, they'll be educating some IT Folks who advocate Sharepoint.
Thanks, Jeremiah - I've found "view source" to be one of the only ways to make sure what you're looking at. Sometimes links from vendor websites even link to competitor solutions, if you look carefully! But I'll keep an eye out for Sharepoint sites, and let you know if we ever bump into them competitively (none to date). And interesting to hear they were invited and declined.
I submitted a comment re: SharePoint and Telligent a couple of hours ago, but I don't see it published yet. Did you get it?
Lawrence Liu
Director of Platform Strategy, Telligent
Before joining Telligent last October, I was the Senior Technical Product Manager for Social Computing in the SharePoint product group. IMHO, SharePoint is a platform with which community oriented solutions can be built, typically with much development effort - http://www.schoolnet.com is a prime (Internet facing) example. But SharePoint as a platform can be used to build *many* types of solutions - that's its core value and its growing partner ecosystem are key reasons why it will continue to be very successful in the market. Telligent is one of a small number of ISVs that can extend SharePoint with OOTB community oriented features and capabilities - http://www.cadence.com is a good example, which is powered by SharePoint and Telligent Community Server seamlessly integrated together.
You can see the short list of SharePoint ISV partners in this space (a few appear on the Forrester Wave report) at http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/06/09/more-isv-partners-betting-on-sharepoint-server-2007-as-the-de-facto-enterprise-social-computing-platform.aspx. This post on the SharePoint Team Blog was written by me last June. :-)
Lawrence Liu
Director of Platform Strategy, Telligent
The preponderance of major media and large corporations that roll out community sites are employing open source packages. You don't have to look very far to recognize this. Now, your report may have been an assessment of vendors, but it's clear the vast majority of community sites are being powered by the likes of Drupal, DotNetNuke and other OSS pkgs. As far as numbers or research, do an brief audit. The fact is companies like Optaros and other large systems integrators (SIs) are consistently building social properties on open source packages for their customers because it provides them bigger margins and because they are familiar with the software since these packages have been around significantly longer than proprietary alternatives.
I'm not saying these packages are better, more complete, or I prefer them. However, I'm certain you'll find packages like Drupal and DotNetNuke individually exceed the sum of all these vendors you've listed here in terms of deployments, yes even with large brands. Think about it. Drupal is downloaded more than 2,000 times a day and DotNetNuke (DNN) is downloaded more than 3,000 times a day. Not all of these are used for community sites, but much is. For evidence of these packages used as community sites look no further than Sony, Britney Spears, and most major newspapers (others can provide more compelling lists--I'm not a Drupal or DNN developer or SI).
Both Drupal and DNN have a huge ecosystem of System Integrators that sell precisely the same services and support you've listed for the commercial products. As mentioned, Optaros is an obvious vendor to speak with. Or perhaps the guys who do CivicSpace (political campaign and fund raising community sites built on Drupal) or the guys who have done Drupal community work for the United Nations and World Bank (forget their name).
My point in all this is: open source pkgs and SIs dominate this space and have pioneered the external community space. It's easy to see this and for real numbers you could talk to a couple big SIs like Optaros. Acquia is young, but I'm sure they could still provide you a very long list of major brands that are using Drupal. Many of which are deploying with the aid and services of SIs. Indeed they could probably point you to some SIs that specialize in this. The same is true for DotNetNuke, which has upwards of 8,000 new public sites go live up every single month. Every month!
"And that's all I have to say about that." - Gump