Enterprise Microblogging Study 2010 (#EMS10)
Enterprise Microblogging is a quickly evolving market. As researchers, it is fascinating to see how these small Twitter-like applications can help companies to better collaborate and share their information through short messages. So yes, based on different case studies and projects conducted by us over the last two years we strongly believe that Enterprise Microblogging is a great approach and should be included in every company’s IT infrastructure.
However, choosing the right tool is anything but easy. Many vendors jumped on the train and there are huge differences in quality. The last comprehensive analysis of the market dates to 2008 (Laura Fittons “Enterprise Microsharing Tools Comparison“). The market landscape has changed significantly ever since this time and we aim at providing an updated guidance through the jungle of tools and vendors. So here is our brand-new Enterprise Microblogging Study (#EMS10):
Dowload study (PDF) | Download comparison matrix, printer-friendly (PDF)
Enterprise Microblogging Study 2010 (#EMS10)
About the Study
Our focus is especially on enterprise. This is why we did not include Twitter clones focusing on non-business use cases or half-ready solutions.
Following these criteria based on 54 initially found microblogging tools we identified 21 business-ready vendors which have been contacted and invited to be part of our study. Eleven vendors featuring big names (i.e. Socialcast, StatusNet [former laconi.ca], Socialtext) could finally be included in the study process, 2 did not want to be included and 8 did not respond to our messages.
While most of the latter were small vendors where sufficient support/sales power can be questioned, this group also includes Lotus Connections (OK we did not really expect to get a quick answer from IBM), Present.ly and Yammer. We truly hope to be able to contact these last three companies to include them in our next update of the study. Until now we have to conclude that choosing a vendor who does not react on emails might be a bad choice for such a mission-critical application like Enterprise Microblogging.
Every participant filled a standardized questionnaire including information on the vendor, software functionality, technology and pricing. We do not choose a ‘winner’ as we are convinced that there are manifold use cases out there with each having its own requirements. However, there is a subjective review of each tool by our team which is aimed to give you guidance and some hints for what tool to choose.
Nobody is perfect. So if you discover errors or want to add your opinion please post it on Twitter using the hashtag #EMS10. We will monitor this tag and get back to you. We would also like to invite companies which might have been forgotten in this version to send us a message. This is the first issue of our study and we are going to update it on a regular basis.
We recently launched our enterprise microblogging solution (http://www.engagesmart.com) and would love for you to take a look at it for any updates to this study.
Anup, thanks for your hint to Engage. We will be happy to include it in the next update and come back to you (scheduled for summer 2010)!
Martin
Same here, (http://www.cleartext.com), a fully integrated microblogging, group chat and IM platform using federated XMPP all the way server-server and client server rather than a ‘web silo’ approach of twitter, Yammer etc.
Hey guys, Great study on EMB ! I’m happy you’re trying to include Lotus Connections; you may try contacting Luis Benitez or Mitch Cohen to see if they can be of help. Are you also planning to include salesforce.com’s Chatter and Google’s Buzz ?
Robert, thanks for your feedback and your hint towards the Lotus Connections persons!
For the next versions of the study we definitely have activity streams on our screen. This means we of course aim to include chatter.