ISG Provider Lens™ Social Business and Collaboration 2018: Social-Centric Collaboration
Social-Centric Collaboration
Social-centric collaboration covers the features of enterprise social networks, next-generation intranet solutions, instant chat messaging and audio- and video-based collaboration. It can also expand to cover groupware, knowledge management, e-mail, conferencing, activity streams, microblogging and talent and skill management. Social team-centric collaboration solutions offer end users productivity enhancements by providing new and improved ways of communicating with peers and continuous enhancements to the enterprise knowledge-base. These solutions ensure that employees in a team or in a project are connected irrespective of device and location. They can create accessible workspaces and virtual rooms, provide collaboration over chat, audio and video channels, integrate with the enterprise ecosystem and provide knowledge orchestration and management. A team-centric collaboration solution’s key strength lies in its ability to make the best use of social interactions, application integration and combined knowledge.
The last few years have seen rapid growth in this market with both new and established players investing heavily in product feature enhancements. The traditional intranet companies are investing in making their solutions more socially collaborative. Collaborative solution companies are moving beyond chat, audio and video communication and are investing in integration with more corporate applications. Established enterprise productivity suite vendors are investing in automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence while providing a comprehensive cohesive workspace environment. Traditional communication solution vendors are investing to make their audio- and video-based products more focused on team collaboration. Successful vendors of consumer-grade technologies are entering this space and are aided by their extreme popularity, reach and familiarity. Overall collaboration solution adoption is driven more by hype and ability to integrate in the existing ecosystem and less by enterprises’ actual needs.
Observations
- Microsoft leads this space with its solutions’ tight integration with its widely-used productivity suite, Office365. Microsoft Teams will be the company’s chief collaboration solution. It has the potential to replace many of its own legacy applications.
- Atlassian is an experienced player in the market with solutions targeting team collaboration, agile development and support services. It has recently upgraded its product portfolio and acquired some key companies which place it ahead of the curve.
- Google benefits from its reach and familiarity in consumer-grade technology and its small and medium business client base. Google has recently upgraded its collaboration solutions to integrate with the rest of its office productivity suite.
- Jive is a trusted name and experienced player in the intranet market. Its on-premise and hybrid implementation is a major contributor to its popularity. The company is adding enterprise applications to integrate with its collaboration solution.
- Slack is the pioneer in creating this market and is challenging the larger players. The solution is quite popular among many small and medium U.S. businesses and is also used in large enterprises by small disparate teams. The company’s focus on automated bots and channels and communication help it retain its position in this space.
- Facebook recently entered this market with its Workplace solution and impressed some large and well-known enterprises enough to become its clients. The Rising Star in this category, Facebook capitalizes on its platform’s familiarity to its popular social networking site and its increasing integrations with business apps.