No Software Overload. Only Engage.
We have chatter, a buzz, a wave, a yammer, a cubetree, a sharepoint, a jive, a bantam, a lotus and many more. These aren’t sounds, shapes, names of flowers or animals; believe it or not these happen to be software product names. These products today are trying to fulfill and differentiate themselves in the space of enterprise 2.0, social media in the enterprise, social CRM, social business software and enterprise collaboration (did I miss a term here!).
With the first generation of social tools having made their entry into enterprises in 2006, year 2009 has seen a wider adoption of corporate social networking platforms and tools. According to a report from Forrester, 2009 saw nearly one in two businesses make use of some form of enterprise 2.0 software. Another report from the Society for Information Management’s Advanced Practices Council (APC) said that at least 50 percent of organizations used wikis as important work collaboration tools in 2009.
Year 2010 has already had some big social computing announcements for enterprises from the likes of Salesforce, Microsoft and others lined up to come with more in the upcoming weeks, it’s already feels like a lot is going to happen this year.
Our Founder/CEO Anup, came up with this word called “Software Overload”. I had heard of Information Overdose or Information Flood, but “Software Overload” was new to me and felt like some new troublesome kid round the block.
To bring out what we mean by “Software Overload” let me first share my prediction for the Enterprise 2.0 product market this year: The Enterprise 2.0 market products in 2010 will split into the following 3 buckets and vendors in each of these buckets will try to create a clear value for their customers.
- General social communication, collaboration and monitoring suites that replace company intranets and portals. Vendors in this bucket will tend to differentiate themselves broadly around similar capabilities, value to customer, price and support. You will see these products also include custom social modules to offer tangible value to customers.
- Specialized social applications that are focused on delivering very tangible value around a specific thing e.g., Idea Management, Time/Productivity Management etc., Since these solve specific problems for organizations vendors will need to bring out definable and greater measurable ROI as part of their offering in this bucket.
- Vendors of enterprise document and content management applications either building or partnering to add a rich social layer around their offerings to compete with bucket 1 vendors
I find that in each of these 3 buckets there are some strong potential leaders that have evolved and are continuing to evolve. Will each of them carve out their niche and succeed? In my opinion the answer is NO. The reason I think the success will be low for a lot of these vendors is because of what we call “Software Overload”. Software Overload is when employees become overburdened with software. Instead of the new software saving time, it eats up even more time and leads to employees being frustrated with using multiple tools daily to accomplish their tasks. Eventually the employees end up telling their boss more often than not that they are looking for information and are under-appreciated, resulting in ½ informed employees, performing at ½ their potential.
Engage has been designed from the ground-up to solve issues in each of the above 3 buckets. It offers a comprehensive social computing and unified communication platform, specialized social applications delivering tangible value and deep integration with enterprise document/content management software. This gives our customers a wide, deep and a complete practical solution for their money. Experience engage first hand at http://www.mangospring.com/experience_engage_collaboration_suite
