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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.

Chalk another one up for the post-PC era: ADP recently launched RUN, a slick-looking mobile version of its popular payroll application. The app integrates with the desktop version of ADP's software and enables fiscal staff to: review and enter payroll, edit hours and pay rates, manage direct deposits, enter vacation and other time off, calculate taxes and more. Interestingly, ADP chose to release this for iOS before BlackBerry, but ADP is planning BlackBerry and Android versions by the end of the year. The free app may herald the future of enterprise computing dominated by mobile applications instead of desktop software.

Although many organizations are allowing users to buy their own devices, enterprises are still spending on company owned devices and phone plans. And many turn to device management solutions from companies like Good, MobileIron, Tangoe and Zenprise to manage both employee owned and company owned devices (see Top 10 Most Important Features for Enterprise Smartphone Management Solutions).

Tangoe offers not just device management, but telecom expense management and consulting. I recently talked with Tangoe CEO Al Subbloie about ways enterprises can save money on their mobile strategies. Some strategies benefit from using device management solutions like Tangoe, but others don't require any investment at all.

In the past ten years, $75 billion has been spent on CRM software, according to Gartner analyst Michael Maoz. During that time, customer satisfaction has risen only 3-5 percent. It's not entirely fair to call CRM a failure - implementation and adoption make a difference and some solutions are better than others. In other words, your mileage may vary. But Maoz suggests another alternative: listen to your customer service representatives. "After all: they hear what customers are saying, and feel their pain," he writes. "It's just that no one in management has cared to tap into the employee."

Adobe isn't a company that's typically thought of as an "enterprise software company," even though it sells its software to large enterprises and offers "enterprisey" products like Acrobat and LiveCycle. That could be changing.

Atlassian recently said it wants to be for technical teams what Adobe is to designers, but it's clear that Adobe wants to be to technical teams what it is to designers. Adobe announced several new products at its annual Max conference, including LiveCycle Mobile, the new BlackBerry SDK, HTML5 tools and its app distribution system InMarket. What's emerging is a full "Adobe Stack" for the enterprise.

Earlier today I linked to R. "Ray" Wang's post on the lack of innovation on the part of enterprise software vendors. One of the key trends Wang mentioned, and we've mentioned here as well, is the "consumerization" of IT. According to Wang, vendors are borrowing extensively from consumer technologies like Facebook for ideas. And most of the technologies we think of as "enterprise 2.0" have been around as enterprise products for some time now. So I'm curious: how many of you are actively using this stuff in your organizations today?

Altimeter Group analyst and co-founder R. "Ray" Wang, whom we quote often here, wrote a new post on enterprise technology trends. Most of them will be familiar to regular readers of this blog, but here's one that I think is worth highlighting: "Innovative Enterprises Push Forward Mostly On Their Own." Wang writes that most vendors are not innovating and that most enterprises at the Information Week 500 event "did not expect to gain market advantage from their existing and legacy vendors" (emphasis mine).

Google announced today that Google Apps Scripts, a "JavaScript cloud scripting language" for automating tasks in Google products, can now be embedded on any Google Sites page. Google Apps Script has been around for a while, but the ability to create custom pages with the scripts is new.

IBM continued its acquisition feast today by gobbling up Clarity Systems, a financial governance software company. It also completed its acquisition of risk and compliance management software company OpenPages. Last week IBM acquired governance software company PSS Systems, and last month it acquired big data company Netezza.

IBM says "These strategic moves further accelerate IBM's business analytics efforts, one of the fastest growing segments in the overall IT industry and a key growth play for IBM." And the company's CFO Mark Loughridge projects business analytics will generate $16 billion in revenue for the company by 2015. But what is business analytics, and how does it differ from business intelligence?

A new Harris Interactive survey, Fortune 1000 Executives' Perspectives on Enterprise Innovation, sponsored by Olympus, found that while the vast majority of the 304 executives who responded believe that enterprise innovation is extremely important, 53% believe their organizations aren't doing enough to promote innovation. The survey identifies several barriers to enterprise innovation.