Gartner’s Collaboration and Social Software Magic Quadrant Requirements
Gartner’s Magic Quadrant is widely used by enterprise customers who are looking to buy collaboration or social software. Most of the time customer use the Magic Quadrant to find out what are their options and who are the leaders in the space. Currently, none of the vendors are in the leadership quadrant. In this blog I would like to review some of the criteria that is required for a collaboration vendor to make it into the leadership quadrant.
At a most basic level a product needs to:
1. Be primarily used for collaboration and social computing and packaged or sold independently.
2. The product has to have at least 10 customers and 500 users.
3. At a minimal the product needs to have the following functionality: membership management, access controls, user profiles, shared workspaces, document sharing, and discussion forums.
Feature Requirements
From a features requirement, Garther gave better scores to products that had most of these features:
Calendar integration, task allocation, task tracking, workflow, basic project management, wikis, blogs, social tags, social bookmarks, social network analysis, social network visualization, content feeds, people search (expertise location), team decision support (voting, sorting, ranking, scenario planning and categorizing), content rating, reputation management and alerting.
If a product was well integrated with email, instant messaging, presence, web conferencing and IP telephony, then the product received a higher rating.
Ability to Execute
Besides the baseline criteria and features, Gartner takes a look at the companies ability to execute. To measure a companies ability to execute, Gartner looks at the following seven criteria:
Product/Service: How much of the collaboration functionality is out of the box and how much needs to still be developed? Evidence of large scale deployments and product maturity is also taken into account.
Overall Viability: Companies financial health, organizational commitment, number of dedicated employees, size of the collaboration and social software business.
Sales Execution/Pricing: Ability to sell into larger organizations, product pricing, and revenue growth.
Market Responsiveness and Track Record: Can the vendor respond to change? Examples: acquisitions, development and updates. Also actions and comments of the product management team are taken into account.
Market Execution - Executive interaction through blogs, size of the marketing organization, thought leadership, and marketing collateral.
Customer Experience: Customer feedback is important. Customer feedback rating is based on the vendors ability to help the customer achieve positive business value and sustaining user adoption. Customer success stories and customer numbers are very helpful to rank high in customer experience.
Operations: Includes the teams skills, experience, and other vehicles that enable the organization to be successful. These include customer communities, support organization, partners, and consulting.
Completeness of Vision
The final criteria Gartner takes into account is the completeness of vision. The following eight categories are used by Gartner to rank a companies completeness of vision:
Market Understanding - Vendor needs to demonstrate a strategic understanding of the market opportunities, which includes business value, urgency of product integration, product capabilities requirements, acknowledgment of other vendors, vision of supporting people not process.
Marketing Strategy - Use cases promoted in the vendors marketing message, online activities, and market priming activities.
Offering (Product) Strategy - Integration between products, interoperability with communication services, mobile support, infrastructure dependencies, and how well the roadmap reflects demand trends.
Business Model - Profitability, revenue growth, and operational costs.
Vertical/Industry Strategy - Emphasis vendor places on vertical solutions and depth of vertical experience.
Innovation - How much is the vendor investing in R&D? Ex. Ajax, service oriented architecture, offline support, REST Interface, RSS, and open source.
Geographic Strategy - Geographic resources that include local resources, partners, and channel.
I summarized all this content from Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Team Collaboration and Social Software 2007, written by Nikos Drakos. You can get a copy of this document from Gartner or Social Text.
Tags: Collaboration, Gartner, Magic Quadrant, Social Software