Jive Positioned in the Visionaries Quadrant of the 2008 Magic Quadrant for Social Software

communities@jivesoftware.com — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 00:10:12 GMT

Great news for our space. Gartner, Inc. just released the 2008 Magic Quadrant for Social Software. In the latest report, we are positioned in the Visionaries Quadrant. Gartner, Inc. defines companies in this quadrant as follows:

"Visionaries in the market demonstrate a strong understanding of current and future market trends and directions, such as the importance of a flexible and transparent collaboration environment, as well as the value of mutual reinforcement between tools that encourage user contribution and tools that encourage bottom-up group and structure formation. Their products and product road maps display a penchant for innovation, especially in terms of architecture and lightweight integration, while their marketing and R&D efforts are boosted by their alignment with the opensource "ecosystem." The Visionaries in this market have not exhibited the scope of delivery of the Challengers, but have demonstrated vision across a range of capabilities."

--Nikos Drakas, Gartner, Inc., 2008 Social Software Magic Quadrant

If you want to read the full report, you can access it here, compliments of Jive.

We believe that Jive's growth and recognition from Gartner proves that there is a transformative power in community-based collaboration and it really is changing the way companies work. Collaboration continues to be a major area of enterprise investment and, in addition to new customers, we've also seen a lot of growth with existing customers as they add more of their employee base onto Jive's Clearspace application.

About the Magic Quadrant:
The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted October 2008 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

What is the Market Size for Enterprise (2.0) Social Software?

chris.morace@jivesoftware.com — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 05:47:00 GMT

Gartner estimates the size of the Enterprise Social Software Market to be $227 million in 2007. They believe it will have a 41% CAGR to reach $708 million by 2011. However, their estimates for portal, collaboration, and content management in 2006 were closed to $9 billion, which confused our CEO, Dave Hersh, about our market valuation back in May.

I've been digging into market sizing numbers again because it gives a great window into how people are understanding this market and the speed at which it is evolving. Having tracked some of this information, I'm inspired to comment on the parameters used for sizing our market. It is clear to me that our market is significantly larger than Gartner currently estimates. For example, Sam Lawrence recently posted about the threat our market poses to traditional office software.

Microsoft alone makes over $10B annually with their office suite focused on personal productivity. As the delineation between creating and sharing documents collapses, their market valuations between these two spaces should merge. As Dave mentioned in his original post, analyst Michael Dortch probably summed up this perspective the best:

"Look, the long and the short of it is that everybody in every business collaborates, internally with colleagues and externally with customers, partners, and prospects, yes? So how big is the "collaboration market," however THAT's defined? I'd be brash enough to say that assuming that half of every business dollar is wasted or consumed by unspecified overhead, a conservative estimate of the extended collaboration market would be, say, half the worldwide gross domestic product (GDP) equivalent. Is THAT big enough??

If it's TOO big, let's come at it from the other, even more conservative end of the spectrum. Let's say that no more than five to 10 percent of the worldwide GDP equivalent represents a defensible stand-in for the collaboration market. That's still a LOT more than many IT-centric markets today, isn't it?"

People, like Andrew McAfee, have been working to draw a line around our market and he has contributed immensely to the understanding of the space, but ultimately still falls short of the entire vision. Jive sees this emerging market as " Social Productivity", which fuses social software and office features to create productivity apps that are socially driven. My questions to you are: Where do you draw the line when so many existing solutions have created such large markets and still fallen so short of the promise of Social Productivity? What do you suspect the size of the market to be?

Blog Posts From Jive Talks Tagged With gartner

Jive Positioned in the Visionaries Quadrant of the 2008 Magic Quadrant for Social Software

What is the Market Size for Enterprise (2.0) Social Software?