Collaboration Cast

This email recently went out to Jive Employees:

As Jive finds it necessary to lay off 1/3 of its staff, Vignette welcomes the Jive team to check out our job postings and consider a career at a company that is investing, and will continue to invest, in a long-term Social strategy.

Vignette is financially strong and can weather these difficult economic times.  We are based in Austin, Texas one the best places to live in the United  States.

 In addition to our focus on social software, Vignette provides a comprehensive suite of web experience management products, which will give you a lot of opportunity to work with many technologies that are defining  the future of the web.

Let us know if you are interested.  We are always looking for top talent that is experienced in the social space.

Sincerely,

Dave Dutch

Sr. Vice President of Products and Marketing

The pace of technology innovation has outpaced IT’s ability to deliver what their customers expect.  Recent surveys by Gartner, Forrester, and McKinsey clearly show how business users are favoring technologies that do not depend on IT. A recent survey conducted by Gartner shows that 30% of users are unhappy with the slow rate of IT change at their companies and this number is suppose to climb to 50% by 2013.

Forrester surveyed marketing managers and 70% of marketing managers were unhappy with their IT departments and preferred to rely on a marketing service provider or consulting organization to help them build and manage their systems.

IT’s lack of resources and ability to adapt to change and to new technologies is also captured in the growth of SAAS deployments over the next few years.  Recent research by Gartner shows how customers spent $1.7 billion on content, social software, and collaboration SAAS based tools in 2007.  The number jumps to $3.6 billion by 2011.  That is a 25.9% growth rate.  It is also the same is the same for CRM, the SAAS CRM market has grown from $1 billion in 2007 to $2.4 by 2011.

Just in the social software market alone 80% of the vendors are SAAS or hosted.   On premise solution vendors cannot catch-up with the speed of change and have become the minority.

A study by McKinsey shows how CIO’s are adapting to meet their customers demands, and they are seriously considering different options.

In 2006, 38% of CIO’s considered adopting SaaS and today the number has jumped to 61%.IT departments will need to change to stay ahead.  SAAS is likely to be the next big trend for IT departments who are trying to cope with their overwhelming user needs.  In the end the customer will prevail.  They will do this with or without IT, and IT better change in order to continue to stay relevant.

Today, Nokia announced that it will be acquiring Plazes, a social software company.  Plazes allows members to post their activites and location from a pc, mobile, phone, or sms.  I would call this multi-channle service a more advaced form of Twitter.  Plazes has become more popular in Europe.

 The goal is to make Plazes available to millions of Nokia customers.  I am sure the business case showed potential high dollars in advertisment and also cell phone charges. 

The power of a mobile social network will be the location connection.  Nokia expects over 400 million devices to be GPS enabled.  This will allow for location based advertisment, which becomes a very powerful tool for advertisers.

 Vodafone was the other company to recently acquire a social software company.  They acuaried ZYB, a Danish company. 

The market is hot and growing for social software.  As stated in my previous blog: The Future Market Opportunity for Mobile Social Networking, the mobile entertainment market is supposted to grow by 36% and recahc $80 billion by 2011.

It will be very interesting to see what social networks become dominant, like Facebook and Myspace on the mobile phones.

By far the most mentioned community sites at the Community 2.0 event were Dell’s Idea Storm and Starbuck’s My Starbucks Ideas. These are great sites that truly allow customers to interact and provide direct feedback to large enterprises.

From my conversation with many customers at the Community 2.0 event, it seems like the dominant reason for deploying a community is for research purposes.

Companies find it cheaper to create a community and harvest their own data, then to hire a research firm to hold focus groups. Most of the research communities being deployed are closed communities for top tier customers. As research communities are deployed successfully, executives feel more comfortable in further investing into communities.

I send my congratulations to Danw Lacallade at Dell for such a great idea and to Nori Yoshida at Salesforce, who invented the technology.

In a recent blog by Dennis Howlett, he indirectly issued a challenge to social software companies.  He said ”The first company to hit $100 million in revenue from the stable of newcomers will be taken out by an offer it can’t refuse.”

The enterprise social software market is full of start-ups seeking after the rich payout.   Some of these include: SixApart, Atlassian, SocialText, Jive, Awareness, and many more.   

 It will be interesting to see which of these start-ups reaches the finish line first.  Let me know which ones you think will be most succesful.  I will for sure cover all these vendors in my reviews section.    

The race is on.  I wish these start-ups best of luck.

Austin Ventures, (”AV”), one of the nation’s largest venture capital firms, announced that they are committing up to $50 million to fund a new company that will focus on creating an industry leading strategic consulting practice and an enterprise class Social Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) suite.

This announcement once again validates the market opportunity around enterprise social software.  According to Gartner, the enterprise social software market will reach $707.7 million by 2011, this translates into a 41 percent compound annual growth rate from 2006 through 2011.

We wish Jeffrey Dachis best of luck as the new CEO of this newly created company.

Next week I will be attending the Community 2.0 conference.  It seems like a very interesting conference sponsored by many different start-ups.  Some of the most prominent sponsors include: mZinga, Awareness, Jive, Ramius, and Live World.

The event will be hosted in Las Vegas, Nevada. It is the conference’s second year and from what they tell me, there will be over 150 customers attending.  Some of those include: Dell, Disney, Intel, BMC, Ebay, Deloitte, Edmunds, PC World, Yahoo, Intuit, and SAP.

The event will cover the regular Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis, blogs, forums, etc…, but seems to be more focused on a comprehensive community platform and how such a platform benefits an enterprise.  Some of the sessions will discuss how to create successful eCommerce, support, consumer goods, mobile, and technical community.  Linden Labs will also be present and I am sure they will talk about 3D communities.

I hope to provide a full report, so stay tuned.  Also, if anyone is planning to attend, let me know and we can meet-up.