Enterprise social: Indian enterprises are still skeptical

When it comes to SMAC, mobility, analytics and cloud may have hit the markets and growing exponentially, we still don’t see the presence of social as much.

According to the research analyst firm Gartner, the social software for workplace market has generally matured and can now look to specific use cases in order to secure better business outcomes. These software offerings are becoming more user connected and will include advanced analytics, IoT and other innovations to enable better opportunities for innovation.

IT leaders might want to shift their focus from deploying a general enterprise social solution to a more targeted application scenarios, which can serve specific needs, suggests Gartner. To understand and differentiate between social software technologies, IT leaders must exploit user experience design practices.

Gartner predicts that by 2020, 30 percent of meetings will be facilitated by advanced analytics and virtual concierges. Also, one-fifth of human dependant activities will be accomplished automatically by using knowledge extracted and codified by observing human activity. It also illustrates how social applications blend into several adjacent markets to fulfil multiple functionalities. With social software being embedded in several products, there is a greater need to build the data context and user experience of how these applications are being put to use.

Gartner has divided the social software market into four segments, with unique vendors in each. They are cloud office, business applications, activity hub and situational applications. This division will enable IT leaders to pinpoint the exact social software requirements in their workplaces, thereby stepping away from a general deployment.

For each segment, Gartner has identified two market leaders, who are unique with their offering. In the cloud business segment, the two leaders are Google Apps for Work and Microsoft Office 365, while in business applications, the top guys are Infor, Salesforce, SAP and Verint Systems. In the activity hub space, Gartner identified IBM and Jive, while in the situational applications, the vendors are Atlassian, Huddle, Redbooth, Sitrion, Slack and VMware.

These divisions can help organizations align their technology solutions to fit specific use cases, to satisfy collaboration requirements for higher productivity. Over the last couple of years, the social software market reflects specific requirements being the key to buying decisions.

According to research firm Markets and Markets, the global enterprise collaboration market will be worth USD 49.51 billion by the year 2021, and Forrester named Microsoft as the market leader of this segment 2017.

Gartner predicts that by 2018, 30 percent of organizations will depend upon graph-based applications, which will enable self-organized teams to manage collaborative work. Additionally, 15 percent of organizations will have unified observational, social network and people analytics to share better workplaces.

With Facebook and Google also stepping up their workplace collaboration software, maybe the day isn’t far when all your meetings can take place without you ever leaving your office or getting stuck in traffic.