collaborationcast.com

Recently, IBM announced it will be bringing Mobile Social Networking to RIM devices. They see a growing and lucrative market opportunity.

Microsoft also has the same vision. They sent 30 employees to the Community 2.0 conference and several of those were responsible for their mobile group.

My believe is that Collaboration and Social Software vendors will need to go mobile with their product strategies if they want to remain relevant over the next few years.

Analysts predict that mobile social networking is expected to grow from 82 million users in 2007 to over 800 million worldwide by 2012.

IBM predicts that the mobile Web market for consumer services such as entertainment and e-mail will reach $80 billion by 2011, more than a 36 percent annual growth.

Another company very interested in mobile social networking is HP. Eric Kintz, Vice President of Strategy & Marketing for HP, made the following comments in this blog, The Digital Mindset:

• John Hadl, whom Brandweek called “the father of mobile marketing” and a top 10 Next Generation Marketer, predicts that in a couple of years mobile phones will be the “premier consumer connection and medium for insights available for marketers.”
• Julie Ask of Jupiter Research makes the case that mobile has already become a natural and increasingly important complement to social marketing campaigns. She provides a list of seven best practices for marketers to keep in mind when creating mobile social marketing campaigns.
• In his keynote at Mplanet 2006, AT&T’s COO Randall Stephenson, said that of the three vehicles AT&T has to reach customers in their new Three Screen Initiative (internet/PC, TV, wireless/mobile phone), wireless is the most important.
• Wireless Week’s Brad Smith suggests mobile advertising may be poised to explode next year.
• Tomi Ahonen calculated that in 2006 mobile social networking was already worth $3.45 billion. In Ahonen’s view, “if you are not on mobile, you won’t be relevant soon.”
• Mmetric recently reported that 12.3 million consumers in the United States and Western Europe accessed a social networking site with their mobile device in June. And this was prior to the launch of the iPhone.

It will be interesting what type of mobile innovations these and other companies will bring us. The future is in Mobile and all collaboration and social software companies should not ignore this channel.

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.