The market of social is growing up. Social software is trying to get into enterprise space too. Engineering and Manufacturing companies are definitely in the spot. Today, communication is mostly Emial and data sharing is mostly Excel. What will come next?
I found an interesting summary in the blog post written by Jeremiah Owyang (Customer Strategy) and Ray Wang(Enterprise Strategy), Industry Analysts at the Altimeter Group. Here is the list of Enterprises SIAs.
- Chatter by Salesforce*: Salesforce has made nods to launch an enterprise system that will “monitor everything that matters most to you in one spot.” Expect this system to be one of the first enterprise SIA systems and will pull in feeds from AppExchange data, external signals, and derive intelligence.
- Gist provides an inbox that ties in with Google Apps aiming them in the enterprise market.
- Socialcast. This lightweight tool allows any company to have an internal Facebook. They recently launched a ‘recommended’ feature on the left nav that can prioritize signal based on the gestures of your network. While they have integration with sharepoint, they’ve yet to offer ability to pipe in other streams. Update the management team has informed me they are working with a few large brands and are integrating signals from ERM and CRM, take for example this case study on Philips.
- Yammer. Yammer has the ability to offer enterprise microblogging features, as well as important RSS feeds. It doesn’t appear to have signal finding features, it’s currently just pulling in updates based on chronology.
I specially liked Gist.Their product accumulates and aggregate multiple social information streams. Take a look on the following video.
What is my take? Business relationships are important. An ability to save some time and communicate can be very valuable. Manufacturing is complicated. SIA tools may be an interesting option to collaborate to them.
Best, Oleg
