Research Director, Social and Collaboration
Leaders
Asana
Cisco
Khoros
Microsoft
Salesforce
Slack
MetaFeatured Vendor
Major Players
Atlassian
HCL
Smartsheet
Wrike
This study applies the IDC MarketScape methodology to evaluate major global collaborative and community platform vendors.
As the pandemic drove the increased need for collaborative technologies, three primary categories emerged: team collaborative applications, team collaborative applications with native work management, and enterprise communities — community management platforms that connect within and outside the enterprise. For this document, IDC identified leaders in the team collaborative applications and enterprise community functional markets. In detail:
This section briefly explains IDC’s key observations resulting in a vendor’s position in the IDC MarketScape. While every vendor is evaluated against each of the criteria outlined in the Appendix, the description here provides a summary of each vendor’s strengths and challenges.
Facebook is positioned in the Leaders category in this 2021 IDC MarketScape for worldwide collaboration and community applications.
A goal of Workplace was to give a voice to everyone, regardless of where people worked or their role. Its approach is intended to connect every employee and create engaging two-way dialog and to democratize access to tools and knowledge. To achieve this, it took some of the best concepts of Facebook and turned them — with additional features — into a modern communications and collaboration enterprise platform that unifies organization communications.
Workplace launched Knowledge Library as a single place to create, store, and share static content. The company’s enhanced live video capabilities include live captions, translations, automatic captioning, and caption editing and live interactive Q&A, including with guest speakers. Workplace improved its analytics in the Insights module, including much improved video insights, and announced strategic integrations with Cisco Webex, ServiceNow, and DocuSign.
Workplace from Facebook connects leaders and employees through two-way dialog, so they can share information with people in a familiar, easy-to-use format, wherever they are. Being mobile first in design, Workplace has an ability to connect every single employee, from the CEO to the frontline worker, and everyone in between.
Workplace has been adopted and effectively used by large multinational organizations such as Walmart, Starbucks, and Nestlé.
Workplace from Facebook should be a consideration when you want to build community at work, are seeking to replace intranet content with easy-to-access content, want to create content to drive feedback and engagement at granular to companywide levels, and would consider video from executives to make sure the messages can reach and engage everyone in the organization.
“Workplace from Facebook should be a consideration when you want to build community at work, are seeking to replace intranet content with easy-to-access content, want to create content to drive feedback and engagement at granular to companywide levels, and would consider video from executives to make sure the messages can reach and engage everyone in the organization.”
This IDC MarketScape looks at team collaborative applications and enterprise community application vendors. The criteria for inclusion are as follows:
For the purposes of this analysis, IDC divided potential key measures for success into two primary categories: capabilities and strategies.
Positioning on the y-axis reflects the vendor’s current capabilities and menu of services and how well aligned the vendor is to customer needs. The capabilities category focuses on the capabilities of the company and product today, here and now. Under this category, IDC analysts will look at how well a vendor is building/delivering capabilities that enable it to execute its chosen strategy in the market.
Positioning on the x-axis, or strategies axis, indicates how well the vendor’s future strategy aligns with what customers will require in three to five years. The strategies category focuses on high-level decisions and underlying assumptions about offerings, customer segments, and business and go-to-market plans for the next three to five years.
The size of the individual vendor markers in the IDC MarketScape represents the market share of each individual vendor within the specific market segment being assessed.
Using the leaders in these markets created a very mature picture of the market. These were among the companies that “stepped up their game” to meet the emerging needs of 2020, and beyond. Even the least mature product in this grouping became mature and very stable. This created a challenge in the visual of the IDC MarketScape graph (refer back to Figure 1); however, we have clarified in the Vendor Summary Profiles section for each vendor.
IDC MarketScape criteria selection, weightings, and vendor scores represent well-researched IDC judgment about the market and specific vendors. IDC analysts tailor the range of standard characteristics by which vendors are measured through structured discussions, surveys, and interviews with market leaders, participants, and end users. Market weightings are based on user interviews, buyer surveys, and the input of IDC experts in each market. IDC analysts base individual vendor scores, and ultimately vendor positions on the IDC MarketScape, on detailed surveys and interviews with the vendors, publicly available information, and end-user experiences in an effort to provide an accurate and consistent assessment of each vendor’s characteristics, behavior, and capability.
Collaborative applications enable groups of people to work together by sharing information, communications, and frequently processes. Definitions of collaborative applications markets are presented in the sections that follow.
Enterprise community applications enable social collaboration capabilities to users that are either inside or outside an organization’s firewall. Solution capabilities should include, but are not limited to, activity streams, blogs, wikis, microblogging, discussion forums, groups (public or private), ideas, profiles, recommendation engines (people, content, or objects), tagging, bookmarking, and online communities. An enterprise community application provides a social collaboration or relationship layer in a business that can be a discrete standalone solution and/or a set of service-oriented application programming interfaces (APIs) or integrated applications that coexist with other business and communications applications. Discrete solutions may support one type of social functionality (such as online communities, ideation, or innovation management) or a broad-based platform that encompasses many functionality traits.
Team collaboration applications (TCAs) provide a workspace and an integrated set of web-based tools for an ad hoc, unstructured, asset-centric, or document-centric collaboration between groups or individuals between known domains. A TCA can be represented by secure “channels” or “rooms” that contain documents, chat history, and transaction history to maintain a persistent auditable history or a more multipurpose shared workspace where users are able to store, access, and share files. Administration is primarily performed by a known user (that governs access rules), but IT administration controls/management may also be possible. TCA solutions may also allow directory integration, policy management, and integration with social collaboration tools (content shared within the social context of newsfeeds or groups). Communication within the TCA environment is mostly asynchronous, business to business (B2B), and closed to a specific set of
