I D C M A R K E T S P O T L I G H T. T h e C h a n g i n g Face of Collaboration in the E n t e r p r ise

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1 I D C M A R K E T S P O T L I G H T T h e C h a n g i n g Face of Collaboration in the E n t e r p r ise May 2013 Adapted from Worldwide Collaborative Applications Forecast by Michael Fauscette and Vanessa Thompson, IDC # Sponsored by Box Collaboration technologies and the use of social solutions to augment an organization's communications environment have grown in acceptance over the past few years. This collaboration is taking place between individual employees, teams, partners, outside agencies, customers, and prospects, as is collaborating over content, which may include marketing collateral, contracts, videos, or presentations. Content sits at the heart of every knowledge worker, and leveraging social technologies around the content an employee creates is a core part of how organizations today can manage the transition to a new way of working. This Market Spotlight examines the impact of social workflow combined with increasing connectivity to anytime, anywhere access to this content. The dynamic is heralding vast changes that are influencing business models, the nature of digital social interactions, and the technology that supports collaboration. As a result, businesses are reacting to these new models, technologies, and the changing expectations of employees, customers, partners, and suppliers. Key enablers to collaborating in today's dynamically changing environment include the following: Tapping innovation in business models The transformation of enterprise application portfolios Managing the burgeoning modalities of content collaboration The changing nature of work and mobile collaboration Innovative Business Models: The Future of Collaboration Meeting changing employee, customer, and partner expectations is becoming a business imperative as companies assume a more "social" workflow. Soliciting the preferences and opinions of employees, customers, partners, and suppliers around projects, research, data analysis, proposals, and essentially any type of content an employee is working on (or content that needs to be created) is where companies can begin to create a deeper connection and commitment in the context of business operations. Managing the complex processes associated with leveraging this feedback is where appropriate management of innovation, communication, and collaboration plays a key role. As competitive pressures rise, companies will increasingly look to content-oriented solutions that include native collaborative environments and social workflow to help build a more agile business. Mobile, cloud, social, and the shift to innovative business models intersect with collaboration in two main areas: Enterprise connectivity. The addition of billions of devices to the network edge will drive the need for more enterprise systems to deploy, manage, and make use of these devices. It will also shift the prevailing traffic from the center of the network outward to edge inward, which will affect computing and communications architectures. The ability to access , IM, conferencing, team workspaces, and content-driven applications is becoming a business imperative, especially as changes in location, labor, and workforce dynamics occur. Mobile connectivity is no longer a "nice to have" but an expectation for business. IDC 1500

2 Employee productivity. Companies not only will adopt more people-centric content applications but also will seek to integrate and embed content-oriented software into other primary business-critical enterprise solutions to support critical business decisions and promote more social workflow. Enterprise content collaboration is rapidly changing, and new features are being defined and incorporated to meet emerging business needs. It is critical for the solutions to keep up with the pace of change. Increasingly, companies will want to integrate and even embed cloud-based content applications that have social functionality into all their existing enterprise applications, so it is essential for vendors to provide open APIs and capabilities to put this type of software into the enterprise workflow. Transformation of the Enterprise Application Portfolio A broad industry and enterprise transformation is taking place with the move from service-oriented architecture (SOA) and composite app development to open API-driven ecosystems and SaaS delivery. Increasingly, information assets will be productized, syndicated, and distributed as callable IP assets via an API. The API will be the means to unlock production data that may currently be in silos to ensure a single version of the truth for employees, partners, and commercial developers. By enabling this approach with regard to the application portfolio, companies will no longer need to build application integrations and will look to "callable" API services over "finished" software services. Early limitations to enterprise-grade cloud collaborative applications initially slowed uptake and adoption of collaborative tools to the cloud. IDC's 2012 CloudTrack Survey indicates that cloud computing environments are now being evaluated as a possible solution before their on-premise counterparts in more than 50% of companies (see Figure 1). These companies may not necessarily be choosing cloud as the solution, as there are still significant barriers to entry for collaboration workloads, but it is an actively changing landscape while cloud continues to mature. F i g u r e 1 Application Suitability for the Public Cloud n = 801 Source: IDC's CloudTrack Survey, 2012 Supply chain and logistics Personal productivity applications (e.g., word processing, spreadsheets) ERP (human resource applications) Collaboration applications HPC applications (e.g., design, engineering, R&D) ERP (financial/accounting applications) CRM applications Business applications (excluding ERP) (Mean score) IDC

3 The move to an API-based environment, coupled with the suitability of collaborative applications to cloud-based environments, will continue to drive enterprise adoption of cloud-based collaboration tools. As the market for cloud-based collaboration tools grows, a large variety of other applications that previously were not determined as "cloudworthy," such as document management, data analysis, help desk, and marketing automation, will enter the market. Akin to these additional market entrants, enterprise cloud content collaboration is quickly defining itself as a market segment assuming both collaboration and document management capabilities. Managing the Many Collaboration Modalities Content collaboration applications form the foundation of modern business, providing a means for communication and fundamental worker productivity. As the traditional workspace extends, delivering a seamless collaborative experience has become an increasingly important factor for enterprise organizations making investment decisions. Two main convergence dynamics are playing out in the collaborative applications market: Conferencing and messaging are becoming a single multimodal experience, and team collaborative applications (applications that enable collaboration around content) and enterprise social software are undergoing increasing convergence. Content collaboration is being used as a way for companies to meet the needs of the new workspace ecosystem and develop a more compelling proposition as conferencing and messaging become increasingly converged and surface a more multimodal experience. Conferencing and messaging are becoming intertwined as buyer demand for real-time communications represents the evolution of standalone enterprise instant messaging capabilities into a more highly developed environment for communication and collaboration. Conferencing application features such as screen sharing, videoconferencing, chat, and presence functionality will also become embedded in instant communications applications. Aligned with the convergence in collaborative applications, a dynamic set of organizational requirements associated with viewing, exchanging, and creating content/information is emerging. A core pillar of this dynamic is the increasing overlap of document-centric and people-centric processes. To support this, team collaborative applications will begin to integrate social capabilities into products, and enterprise content collaboration solutions will be sought to improve not only the sharing of information but also the sharing of experiences that supplement data to inform a business decision. Enterprise spending also reflects the growing acceptance of the convergence of collaborative applications. Spending on software-based collaboration, and particularly social software, is accelerating, with 14% of 701 respondents to IDC's Social Business Survey indicating they will spend more than $1 million on social software through 2013 (see Figure 2) IDC 3

4 F i g u r e 2 Spending on Enterprise Social Software and Software-Based Collaboration Solutions Q. What is your current annual budget for the following initiatives? We do not have budget currently $0 4,999 $5,000 14,999 $15,000 29,999 $30,000 49,999 $50,000 74,999 $75,000 99,999 $100, ,999 $150, ,999 $250, ,999 $500, ,999 $1 million+ Don't know (% of respondents) Enterprise social software Software-based collaboration solutions n = 701 Source: IDC's Social Business Survey, 2013 In 2013 and beyond, organizations will look for more cost-effective means of communications through applications that are functionally on par with traditionally packaged software products or at least provide "good enough" functionality for 80% of customer needs. The upward trajectory of cloud content collaborative applications is set to continue as organizations increasingly invest in moving more mission-critical workloads to the public cloud. Mobile Collaboration: Where Applications and Communications Meet Mobile devices and mobile software solutions greatly enhance the value of collaboration solutions by ensuring that the right people can always be included in business decisions when they need to be made from anywhere and at any time. With this, many organizations are faced with increasing remote and mobile worker populations while also needing to respond and interact with customers in a faster, more efficient manner. To meet this inevitability, employees need the real-time connectivity that mobile devices offer, but they also need intelligent filtering as well as apps that are contextually aware to enable efficiency in business decision making. In the enterprise, mobile collaboration environments are proliferating in two main scenarios: by making the mobile device a "window" into existing enterprise apps and/or by adding mobile-specific capabilities to an enterprise's application portfolio, such as specific mobile productivity tools. At a higher level, both scenarios encompass the burgeoning mobile collaboration workflow, meaning that an enterprise collaboration and communications environment needs to be enabled across multiple platforms IDC

5 Advances in mobile device technology and mobile operating systems (OSs) and networks also continue to increase the value of collaboration technologies, particularly aligned with the convergence in collaboration modalities. Enabling this mobile experience to transcend an organization's existing communication/collaboration and application environment will allow the emergent enterprise workspace to tackle the new challenges of enabling the measuring and managing of employee productivity. According to IDC's Social Business Survey, end users are doing an increasing amount of work on mobile devices, but they still rely on the desktop for specific tasks such as creating documents (see Figure 3). F i g u r e 3 Types of Work Done on Mobile Devices Versus Desktop PCs n = 701 Source: IDC's Social Business Survey, 2013 Checking s Composing s Web browsing Reading documents (.pdf,.doc,.docx,.ppt, pptx,.txt,.xls,.xlsx, etc.) Consumer social networking (Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, etc.) Accessing and updating calendar Online office productivity Participating in an enterprise social network (including activity streams) Participating in an online community File/content sharing service Web conferencing (audio/video) Creating documents (.pdf,.doc,.docx,.ppt, pptx,.txt,.xls,.xlsx, etc.) Web chat/voice/video over IP applications (including presence) Web conferencing (application/screen sharing) Ideasourcing (tools that are used to collect ideas/ feedback through voting, ranking) Web broadcasting (watching/participating in events) Playing music Playing games/gamification Printing Mobile Desktop (% of respondents) 2013 IDC 5

6 Customer use and extension of mobile content collaboration solutions with additional apps and services are commonly linked to the initial deployment use case; however, the market is maturing quickly and use cases are broadening. Box OneCloud is a great example of the available ecosystem of both mobile-specific and enterprise applications that can extend the use of Box. Understanding the top applications of Box OneCloud provides insight into how organizations are extending the functionality of Box: CloudOn. Users can edit Microsoft Office documents on their tablet and save that content back to Box. Users want the ability to edit content while on the go; with CloudOn, they are able to do this as well as collaborate on that content within Box. Notability. Users can create and take notes on their mobile device and save the notes back to Box. They can edit an old note or collaborate on a note with team members by sharing it in Box. iannotate. Users can read and mark up PDF documents with highlights, questions, or comments. iannotate is a good example of an app that spans major mobile platforms (ios and Android), therefore transcending mobile platforms. The ability to understand user tasks and map the tasks against the uptake of applications on Box OneCloud provides great insight into the critical applications that enable enterprise users to transition to a more seamless mobile working environment. As the collaboration and communications environment inside enterprise organizations continues to converge yet proliferate, enabling business decision making and streamlined access to data and information to inform decisions will be increasingly complex but also essential. Application ecosystems such as Box OneCloud can provide a strong tie from mobile content collaboration solutions to critical business decision systems, bridging the gap between everywhere content access and everywhere content creation. Conclusion and Guidance The lifetime of any relationship between customers, employees, partners, and/or suppliers is tied together by content and the associated context to that content. Managing all of the interactions throughout the lifetime of these relationships requires orchestration of business processes to create a flow that is planned and architected so that employee, customer, or partner interaction can be as streamlined and full featured as possible. Enabling content to be surfaced within this orchestration layer will become critical as companies increasingly rely on ad hoc content and information to provide context to the business process or workflow and streamline existing processes. Social workflow will continue to be embedded in business applications, decision systems, and business processes and will become inherent in the way users collaborate in organizations. Through a content collaboration lens, the spectrum of possible use cases and required collaboration modalities to support this is extremely broad. This spans consumer-like sharing of content; rich media and comments from known or unknown parties on sites such as Yelp, Twitter, or Instagram; and tightly controlled EDI-like interchanges. At the middle of the spectrum is a burgeoning enterprise requirement to enable a multipurpose content collaboration solution that not only meets the requirements for users to share and collaborate in a streamlined manner but also delivers enterprise controls that can enable a persistent and auditable solution. As companies transition to a new way of working, the ability to leverage content collaboration as a complement to existing social and business workflow processes will be critical to maintaining control of burgeoning content. As companies address increasing business pressures, they will look to understand the key market factors, business goals, outcomes, and outputs, as well as the need for organizational transformation. A core component of this transformation includes not only enhancing current business processes but also adopting the technology needed to support, facilitate, and measure these changes. With content being such an essential component of business processes IDC

7 and operations, the immediate requirement for companies is to simply meet user expectations. Longer-term requirements involve enabling users to engage in an ongoing conversation with constituents inside and outside the business. Robust content collaboration plays a critical role in this, but it must be tempered with integration with other critical business applications and processes to maintain a structured and auditable workflow. A B O U T T H I S P U B L I C A T I ON This publication was produced by IDC Go-to-Market Services. The opinion, analysis, and research results presented herein are drawn from more detailed research and analysis independently conducted and published by IDC, unless specific vendor sponsorship is noted. IDC Go-to-Market Services makes IDC content available in a wide range of formats for distribution by various companies. A license to distribute IDC content does not imply endorsement of or opinion about the licensee. C O P Y R I G H T A N D R E S T R I C T I O N S Any IDC information or reference to IDC that is to be used in advertising, press releases, or promotional materials requires prior written approval from IDC. For permission requests, contact the GMS information line at or gms@idc.com. Translation and/or localization of this document requires an additional license from IDC. For more information on IDC, visit For more information on IDC GMS, visit Global Headquarters: 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA USA P F IDC 7