July 13, 2011 Navigating The Online Collaboration Suite Landscape

Transcription

1 July 13, 2011 Navigating The Online Collaboration Suite Landscape by TJ Keitt for Content & Collaboration Professionals Making Leaders Successful Every Day

2 July 13, 2011 Navigating The Online Collaboration Suite Landscape by TJ Keitt with Matthew Brown, Rob Koplowitz, Alan Weintraub, and Heather Martyn Executive Summary Moving collaboration workloads to the public cloud is an attractive proposition for content and collaboration professionals and information workers alike. Why? They re inexpensive to stand up and operate. Yet IT departments often find themselves overwhelmed by both the sheer number of available services and the diversity of tools that information workers want to access from work. To simplify the evaluation process, this report breaks down the online collaboration software suite landscape into four vendor types and provides key criteria for deciding how to bring them in (or allow them to stay) in your business. table of Contents Demand For Low-Cost Collaboration Tools Makes The Cloud Attractive Vendors Offer Four Types Of Cloud Collaboration Services Point Solution Vendors Bifurcate On How Comprehensively They Address An Issue Tool Set Vendors Focus On Either Content- Sharing Or Social Software Business-Process-Specific Tools Are Bundled Into Apps Or Connect With Multiple Apps Online Information Workplace Vendors Have Two Approaches To Providing Technology C&C Pros Should Consider Three Factors When Selecting Online Tools NOTES & RESOURCES Forrester interviewed 18 vendor companies, including Box, Central Desktop, etouch, Google, Huddle, IBM, Microsoft, Moxie Software, Novell, PBworks, salesforce.com, Socialcast, Socialtext, SuccessFactors, Tibco, VMware, Yammer, and Zoho. Related Research Documents How SaaS-Able Are Content, Collaboration, And Data Software Categories? July 8, 2009 Technology Populism Shapes The Collaboration Vendor Landscape April 28, recommendations Map Cloud Solutions Back To Your Overall Collaboration Strategy 10 Supplemental Material 2011 Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Forrester, Forrester Wave, RoleView, Technographics, TechRankings, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Reproduction or sharing of this content in any form without prior written permission is strictly prohibited. To purchase reprints of this document, please clientsupport@ forrester.com. For additional reproduction and usage information, see Forrester s Citation Policy located at Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change.

3 2 Navigating The Online Collaboration Suite Landscape Demand for low-cost collaboration tools makes the cloud attractive Google opened the door for enterprises to move certain collaboration workloads namely to the public cloud in Collaboration software market leaders IBM and Microsoft soon followed suit, unveiling LotusLive and Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS), respectively. Aside from these headline-grabbing vendors, a number of smaller online vendors like coaction, oovoo, and PBworks also target the business market with services for everything from project management, to desktop videoconferencing, to social software. Forrester fields numerous inquiries from content and collaboration (C&C) professionals interested in using these online services. With Microsoft s release of BPOS successor, Office 365, we ve seen this interest intensify. What s driving C&C pros to seriously consider online collaboration tools? Several factors stand out: Highly connected information workers drive better business outcomes. In our most recent Forrsights Workforce Employee Survey, Forrester found that two-thirds of the North American and European information workforce work outside of the office at some point during a month. 1 This means that C&C pros must enable employees to work with one another regardless of location or device they re using. We find that companies realize business-oriented outcomes, such as faster time-to-market and decision-making, when distributed workers have a range of collaboration tools accessible to them at the right time. 2 Online collaboration services offer low-cost alternatives to on-premises versions. Thirtynine percent of North American and European enterprise IT professionals tell Forrester their businesses have invested in or plan to invest in collaboration software-as-a-service (SaaS) (see Figure 1). Why? Relative to on-premises software, it does not cost much to provision, maintain, and scale up these services. Consider that a business can provide employees IBM LotusLive inotes for as low as $2/user/month. This is a very attractive price point for IT leaders trying to minimize the number of applications they manage in order to cut operating costs while meeting the business demands for collaboration services. Employees now provision their own tools when IT doesn t meet their demand. Nearly a quarter of information workers have used an online service in the past 12 months for business purposes (see Figure 2). This isn t surprising. The broad availability and ease of use of these services means that workers can find and provision tools to solve business problems on their own. This, of course, worries IT departments. For example, Forrester fields many inquiries from C&C pros trying to figure out how to deal with employee-created and -run Yammer microblogging networks. C&C pros must investigate cloud offerings they can sanction and control to stay in front of this trend while providing workers the flexible tools they require. July 13, , Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

4 Navigating The Online Collaboration Suite Landscape 3 With so many offerings from so many vendors, the online collaboration tool set evaluation process can be daunting. In this report, we provide a taxonomy of the types of services on the market. We also provide a mechanism for examining technology pitched directly to IT departments and the services information workers are procuring on their own. Figure 1 IT Leaders Gravitate Toward Online Collaboration Tools What are your firm s plans to adopt the following software-as-a-service/saas offerings/approaches? Don t know Not interested Interested but no plans Planning to implement Implemented, in the next 12 months not expanding Planning to implement in a year or more Expanding/upgrading implementation SaaS for collaboration or as-a-service like WebEx, Microsoft BPOS, or Google Apps 5% 27% 28% 12% 9% 10% 8% 53% of IT pros say the benefit of SaaS is lower implementation costs, and 48% say it s lowering ongoing costs. Base: 1,007 North American and European IT services decision-makers from enterprises with 1,000 employees or more Source: Forrsights Services Survey, Q Source: Forrester Research, Inc. Figure 2 A Number Of Information Workers Are Using SaaS Tools Have you used a login-required, non-authorized website or Internet service in the last 12 months to help you do your job? Yes No Not sure 22% 65% 12% 65% of workers who use online services for work accessed between 1 and 3 sites in the last 12 months. Base: 4,892 North American and European business technology users who use the Internet for work-related purposes Source: Forrsights Workforce Employee Survey, Q Source: Forrester Research, Inc. 2011, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited July 13, 2011

5 4 Navigating The Online Collaboration Suite Landscape Vendors offer four types of cloud collaboration services Online collaboration services offer C&C pros inexpensive tools to address a specific business problem (e.g., sharing content between companies) or to provide a broadly applicable platform for the whole organization (e.g., ). Forrester examined 18 vendors SaaS offerings against two dimensions: number of use cases it can serve and level of IT support required. The analysis yielded four categories of online collaboration tools (see Figure 3). Each category varies in its ability to integrate with tools the business is already using (see Figure 4). So what are these categories? Point collaboration solutions. These tools serve a single, well-defined purpose and are most likely to enter an enterprise through consumerization because they provide a solution for a particular business problem. For example, YouSendIt provides information workers a means of sending large files that could not easily pass corporate attachment-size restrictions. These tools typically resolve a worker s issue without any need for integration into internal systems reducing the need for IT to do much more than verify the security credentials and retention policies of the service. Extensible online collaboration tool sets. Consumerization also pulls these tools into business, but their applicability tends to be broader. Why? Because instead of addressing one issue like file transfer these solutions provide multiple modes of collaboration to address a number of communication issues. For example, Huddle offers a document repository, team calendars, user profiles, an audioconferencing bridge, and a web conferencing tool. IT may also play a bigger role in the deployment of these tools as these vendors offer native integrations into business applications. For example, VMware Zimbra has a library of integrations with other collaboration and business apps called Zimlets. Business-process-specific online collaboration tool sets. Services in this category align with a particular business process to allow for faster decisions within a workflow. For example, Salesforce Chatter is integrated with salesforce.com s CRM offerings as well as Force.com, providing social capabilities, like activity streams, for any business app built on the platform. Tying these collaboration tools into specific business applications increases requirements for IT involvement. This connection may limit the tools relevance to segments of the workforce who don t frequently use the connected application. Online Information Workplaces. Providing a fully integrated set of commonly used applications like collaboration tools and business applications via a contextual experience is what Forrester calls an Information Workplace. Collaboration software market giants IBM and Microsoft, along with upstarts Google and Zoho, are in the early days of building online platforms to support Information Workplaces. These vendors online suites include integrated productivity, communication, collaboration, and business applications. These workloads are applicable to the entire enterprise, which means that IT or senior management oversees the tools purchase and integration with internal identity management systems. July 13, , Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

6 Navigating The Online Collaboration Suite Landscape 5 These general categorizations offer basic guideposts for understanding how online collaboration software can address businesses needs. However, C&C pros must also evaluate the specific service offerings within in each of these categories when selecting tools for teams, departments, or their entire organization. Figure 3 Different Online Collaboration Offerings Need Different Levels Of IT Involvement Departmental acquisition/ deployment IT-centric acquisition/ enterprise deployment Point collaboration solution Extensible online collaboration tool set Business process specific online collaboration tool set Online Information Workplace Source: Forrester Research, Inc. Figure 4 How A Tool Will Be Used Determines How It Integrates Into Legacy Applications Offering IT involvement necessary for deployment Enterprisewide workload Native integrations with other collaboration applications Native integrations with business applications Example companies Point collaboration solutions Box, etouch, Yammer, Yousendit Extensible online collaboration tool set Central Desktop,Huddle, Moxie, Novell, PBworks, Socialtext, VMware Business process specific online collaboration tool set Salesforce.com, Socialcast, SuccessFactors, Tibco Online information workplace Google, IBM, Microsoft, Zoho = High need = Moderate need = Low need Source: Forrester Research, Inc. 2011, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited July 13, 2011

7 6 Navigating The Online Collaboration Suite Landscape Point Solution Vendors Bifurcate On How Comprehensively They Address An Issue To understand how well each point solution solves a particular problem, Forrester reviewed the breadth of functionality they offer. This revealed that some vendors tackle a piece of a bigger issue, while others strive for a comprehensive solution. As such, Forrester sees two common types of point solution offerings: A singular tool tuned for a specific purpose. These products, often found in the contentsharing and web conferencing spaces, are typically lean offerings. For example, Dropbox, a popular storage and sharing tool, provides customers a file repository that they can access on a multitude of devices and share with others and nothing more. While some of these vendors, like YouSendIt, are offering plug-ins or lightweight integrations into other business systems, these enhancements mostly bolster the core purpose of the app. Multiple tools built around a specific task. These products also address a single problem, but add more functionality for a richer user experience through enterprise 2.0 elements. For example, Box, a content-sharing tool, incorporates profiles, communities, activity streams, and discussion forums into its core document repository capabilities. Vendors of these products also integrate with some business systems, such as etouch integrating its SamePage wiki with Liferay Portal and Yammer s NetSuite integration. Thus, these solutions address more aspects of a business problem and are often wedded to other apps. Tool Set Vendors Focus On Either Content-Sharing Or Social Software Vendors that are providing tool sets begin with one of two foundations: a document-centric approach to collaboration or a people-centric approach to collaboration. 3 However, regardless of foundation, tool set vendors all provide elements of both collaboration approaches. So as C&C pros evaluate these solutions, they should note: Document-centric offerings leverage social tools to accelerate content-sharing. The tools at this end of the spectrum are billed as project management, document-sharing, and teaming technologies. As such, these vendors have built robust document management capabilities. For example, Central Desktop provides real-time co-authoring capabilities, library services, and records management functions as part of its platform. For these vendors, the enterprise 2.0 components they supply profiles, activity streams, wikis, blogs, and so on are meant to support how workers share content. People-centric offerings optimize interactions, which can include content-sharing. These vendors such as Moxie have invested heavily in creating an enterprise 2.0 tool suite. Thus, they have robust profiles, wikis, blogs, and other social software. Content management components are often provided through integrations with third-party systems. For example, Socialtext provides library services through its SharePoint connector, letting workers check July 13, , Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

8 Navigating The Online Collaboration Suite Landscape 7 out, work on, and check in content housed in SharePoint through the Socialtext interface. Thus, these solutions augment, rather than replace, existing content management solutions. Business-Process-Specific Tools Are Bundled Into Apps Or Connect With Multiple Apps To integrate business applications with online collaboration software, vendors take one of two approaches: embed collaboration capabilities in a specific business application, or stream information from a range of business applications. Forrester categorizes these methodologies as: Native collaboration tools bundled into a business application. Vendors providing online business applications like salesforce.com typically add collaboration capabilities to the business processes they serve. While vendors may offer these tools as standalone offerings as SuccessFactors does with its social software solution CubeTree and salesforce.com does with Chatter and have some clients who acquire them as such, the bulk of users use these tools in conjunction with a business application. Third-party activity streams that can be integrated into business applications. Solutions in this category allow information workers to monitor events across a company s business applications in a central location. They are not wedded to a given business application, so C&C pros can look at these tools to provide alerts, or feeds, from a range of applications. For example, Tibco s tibbr connects to SAP, salesforce.com, and NetSuite products while recent VMware acquisition Socialcast has an offering called Reach that provides businesses activity streams from various accounting, customer relationship management (CRM), and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Online Information Workplace Vendors Have Two Approaches To Providing Technology For C&C pros considering all-inclusive collaboration suites, the question is whether or not to move the entire collaboration workload into the cloud. The decision typically boils down to two schools of thought: Move certain workloads to the cloud and keep others on-premises. Vendors taking this view typically have a large legacy installed base, like Microsoft and IBM. They argue that the cloud is not ready to handle the custom applications and integrations their clients have been doing on-premises. So they recommend that clients move slowly until there is parity between the cloud and on-premises tools. For example, Microsoft counsels keeping custom SharePoint development (e.g., human resources application) on-premises while moving standardized workloads (e.g., profiles) into the SharePoint Online environment. Move all productivity and collaboration tools to the cloud. Vendors taking this view typically don t have any on-premises offerings and want their clients to move quickly to the cloud. The leader among these vendors, Google, does not allow clients to purchase specific apps, like , Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited July 13, 2011

9 8 Navigating The Online Collaboration Suite Landscape Instead, it only allows the purchase of its complete productivity and collaboration offering for $50/ user/year. In doing so, Google hopes to wean its clients off on-premises applications and get them comfortable with the cloud. As for the custom apps clients have built on-premises, Google like its fellow traveler Zoho created a development platform, Google App Engine, to let its clients start over in the cloud. C&C Pros should consider three factors when selecting online tools Functional breadth is only one factor C&C pros must consider when sanctioning an employeeprocured solution or selecting a particular vendor. The scope of IT s involvement in the tool s deployment and the ultimate decision as to whether or not a solution should be used in the business rests on the answers to three questions (see Figure 5): 1. Who are the intended users of the technology? IT involvement in supporting, securing, and ensuring service reliability for enterprisewide tool deployments is a must. However, this may not be the case with some point solutions and extensible tool sets brought in at the team or departmental level. For example, a firm in the hospitality industry passively sanctions its employees use of consumer instant messaging services, Skype, and Google Docs. The benefit to this business is productive employees What is the nature of the information being shared? C&C pros must ensure that tools provide safeguards and that people are aware of corporate policy surrounding sensitive information. For example, digital marketing firm AKQA allows its roughly 500 project staffers to manage projects and share information with clients through the online service Huddle. This is acceptable to AKQA Director of IT Robert Burns because his department can control access to each workspace from an IT administration console. 3. What systems if any does the tool have to integrate with? At a minimum, IT departments require integration with LDAP and Active Directory systems for single sign-on and access control. In terms of business applications, a focal point of vendor integration efforts to date has been with other cloud solutions like Salesforce CRM. Far fewer have accomplished integrations with on-premises systems outside of integrations with Microsoft SharePoint. For integrations with other legacy business systems, most online collaboration tools vendors claim to offer APIs for IT or systems integrators to use. July 13, , Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

10 Navigating The Online Collaboration Suite Landscape 9 Figure 5 Scope, Security Needs, And Needed Integrations Should Inform The Online Strategy Small teams One or multiple business units Enterprisewide What is the maximum level of deployment for this tool? How sensitive is the content and other information shared in the tool? How important is it to integrate these tools into existing business applications? Not sensitive Moderately sensitive Highly sensitive Not important Somewhat important Very important Source: Forrester Research, Inc. Recommendations map cloud solutions back to your overall collaboration strategy The low cost and rapid deployment capabilities of cloud solutions make them highly attractive to C&C professionals. Online solutions, though, are not simply online alternatives for on-premises software. As Google Apps Product Manager Jonathan Rochelle notes, businesses looking to do the exact same things in the cloud as they did on-premises have the wrong expectations for what the cloud provides. So C&C pros must assess the cloud s strengths and weaknesses in relation to what outcomes the business is trying to achieve. To do this, Forrester recommends C&C pros: Identify the use cases workers have for online collaboration. Outside of cutting costs, online collaboration solutions are uniquely positioned to address certain issues. For example, project teams can easily share calendars and documents in an online content sharing tool. This is the reason information workers reach for these solutions on their own. C&C pros should examine how employees are using collaboration technology they bring into the business to understand what business problems they are trying to solve. These assessments can be done through in-person interviews or online surveys that allow respondents to remain anonymous. Create a list of functionality that could address employee issues. After considering the challenges workers face, C&C pros should assess methods of solving these problems. Here again, look at the tools that workers are bringing in on their own. This will allow C&C pros to 2011, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited July 13, 2011

11 10 Navigating The Online Collaboration Suite Landscape identify the unique capabilities that online tools have to help information workers do their jobs. Use what you learn to expand the search for products both in the cloud and onpremises that can address these issues for employees. Link the use case and functionality to an online vendor type. Once the problems and potential solutions are understood, C&C pros can then leverage Forrester s online vendor taxonomy to identify the type of vendor needed. If the problem is specific to one group, it may argue for a point solution or a tool set over an online Information Workplace. For example, AKQA s IT leaders realized the firm s project staff needed a way to share calendars and documents with clients and was able to find the answer in Huddle, a tool set solution. Validate that the solution meets security and integration needs. The final step before blessing a given online collaboration technology is to ensure it has the security capabilities (e.g., granular access controls, LDAP integration) and integration tools (e.g., APIs, mashup tools) that the business needs. C&C pros should lead this evaluation process in coordination with internal security and sourcing professionals, challenging prospective vendors on their integration tools and professional services capabilities. Be sure to ask about the business applications they natively link to and the level of effort involved in tying in systems that are not native integrations. Also include business stakeholders in this process to validate that the tool will meet their needs. Supplemental MATERIAL Methodology Forrester s Forrsights Software Survey, Q4 2010, was fielded to 2,403 IT executives and technology decision-makers located in Canada, France, Germany, the UK, and the US from small and mediumsize (SMB) and enterprise companies with two or more employees. This survey is part of Forrester s Forrsights for Business Technology and was fielded during September and October LinkedIn Research Network fielded this survey online on behalf of Forrester. Survey respondent incentives include a choice of gift certificates and research reports. We have provided exact sample sizes in this report on a question-by-question basis. Forrester s Forrsights for Business Technology fields 10 business-to-business technology studies in 12 countries each calendar year. For quality control, we carefully screen respondents according to job title and function. Forrester s Forrsights for Business Technology ensures that the final survey population contains only those with significant involvement in the planning, funding, and purchasing of IT products and services. Additionally, we set quotas for company size (number of employees) and industry as a means of controlling the data distribution and establishing alignment with IT spend calculated by Forrester analysts. We have illustrated only a portion of survey results in this document. For access to the full data results, please contact forrsights@forrester.com. July 13, , Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

12 Navigating The Online Collaboration Suite Landscape 11 Companies Interviewed For This Document Box Central Desktop etouch Google Huddle IBM Microsoft Moxie Software Novell PBworks Salesforce.com Socialcast Socialtext SuccessFactors Tibco VMware Yammer Zoho Endnotes 1 Over time, this trend will have profound implications for everything from the location and design of offices, to IT s provisioning of technology, to how business leaders marshal expertise. See the June 7, 2011, Demystifying The Mobile Workforce report. 2 In our Forrsights Software Survey, Q4 2010, Forrester found that businesses were more likely to see reduced travel costs, improved project management, faster decision-making, and lower cycle time/time-to-market for new products if they provided their employees more collaboration tools. See the March 21, 2011, The State Of Collaboration Software Implementations: 2011 report. 3 Document-centric collaboration refers to services built around facilitating the creation, sharing, and markup of content. People-centric collaboration refers to services designed to break down rigid hierarchies to allow information workers to locate and interact. 4 In perhaps the simplest but best example of harnessing consumerization that we ve yet seen, K. and her team have a practice of assessing the consumer tools that employees naturally use around the world, then leaving in place the ones that are safe enough and highly effective. See the May 23, 2011, How Consumerization Drives Innovation report. 2011, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited July 13, 2011

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