Collaboration Giant Microsoft Is Still Champion Joined by Cisco, OpenText and Socialtext as the Market Goes Social

London, ON  (November 1, 2011)  Info-Tech Research Group’s recent Collaboration Vendor Landscape report titled “Select the Right Collaboration Platform,” indicated growth in the collaboration market listing Cisco, OpenText and Socialtext alongside Collaboration giant, Microsoft SharePoint as market Champions.  The emergence of solutions that not only compete with SharePoint but can integrate with SharePoint has led to some interesting options for organizations that want to take advantage of advanced social features.

“Enabling social collaboration among employees, such as activity feeds from people and systems, is becoming a major design criteria for enterprise collaboration platforms,” said Tim Hickernell, Associate Lead Analyst with Info-Tech Research Group.  “Microsoft SharePoint gained more social collaboration features in the 2010 release, but Cisco, OpenText and Socialtext have surpassed SharePoint’s social collaboration feature set.  However SharePoint remains a Champion in the area of document collaboration. Since most firms have deployed some version of SharePoint, buying trends have changed from products that compete with SharePoint to products that complement SharePoint.”

Microsoft SharePoint is the obvious giant in the Collaboration landscape with an installed base close to 80%.  Its release of SharePoint 2010 added a robust set of social features on top of its content management capabilities and Microsoft is once again listed as a Champion in Collaboration. 

Cisco Quad is a newer solution that first appeared on the market in mid-2010and now offers an impressive feature set that propelled it into the Champion category of the Landscape.   Cisco’s solution is considered a “real-time juggernaut” paired with Cisco’s Unified Communications products.  The result of this pair has clients enjoying in-platform voice and video chat and presence indicators.

Socialtext, one of the first vendors in the social collaboration space, also received a Champion ranking in the report.  Offering a less traditional alternative for collaboration tools, its deep social collaboration feature set includes social tagging, activity feeds and advanced expertise search.  According to the report this alternative solution integrates well with SharePoint as an add-on and is best-of-breed for organizations with specific internal social networking needs. 

Another long-time player in the market, OpenText received Champion status for its Social Workplace solution.  Offering a good balance of both traditional and social collaboration tools with a solid focus on the latter, this platform is a SaaS based solution and can be up and running quickly for specific, team-based needs. 

For the full list of Info-Tech Research Group’s recommendations for selecting a Collaboration vendor visit: http://www.infotech.com/research/ss/select-the-right-collaboration-platform.

Info-Tech Research Group Vendor Landscape reports recognize outstanding vendors in the technology marketplace.  Assessing vendors by the strength of their offering and their strategy for the enterprise, Info-Tech Research Group Vendor Landscapes pay tribute to the contribution of exceptional vendors in a particular category.

About Info-Tech Research Group

With a paid membership of over 8,000 organizations worldwide, Info-Tech Research Group (www.infotech.com) is the global leader in providing tactical, practical Information Technology research and analysis. Info-Tech Research Group has a thirteen-year history of delivering quality research and is North America's fastest growing full-service IT analyst firms. 

 

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