Several dozen companies compete to bring social software to the businesses. There may be fewer by this time next year.
Social software is an established business category, says Ross Mayfield
Social software is becoming the latest craze in enterprise software. Corporations large and small are giving hard thought to how they integrate social networks, wikis, collaborative tools and Twitter-like microblogging to their computing systems.
“By now, it’s grown to be an established category of enterprise software,” says Ross Mayfield, chairman and president of Socialtext, one of the competitors in the space. “It’s established in the minds of CIOs.”
But there also are too many niche players and small companies in need of heft. That should lead to at least some consolidation over the next year, Mayfield said at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.
Consolidation might not be a bad thing. A Gartner analysis of the market show more than two dozen companies competing in narrow slices of the market with far fewer firms providing a broader, or visionary, approach to the market.
Of course, larger players, including Microsoft and IBM, also have this market in their sites and an ability to mesh social offerings with their other products.
Mayfield says Socialtext is one company broadening its offerings. “We’ve woven (Socialtext’s offerings) into a business platform,” he says. That’s because businesses are trying to make “platform decisions.”
I enjoyed reading your insight…social media software is vital in marketing today, we work at creating it every day.
It will be interesting to see if consolidation will happen as a result of what the industry needs or by what consumers demand.City Hotel London</a