Nemertes Impact Analysis:

Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM) launched a private beta of its “Chatter” social networking hosted service, giving customers the opportunity to leverage a private Facebook-style environment to collaborate. With Chatter, Salesforce enters the enterprise social software market competing against the likes of Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO), IBM Lotus (NYSE:IBM), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), and a host of smaller vendors.

Chatter’s introduction reflects a growing interest among collaboration managers in leveraging social network concepts such as following, tagging, and sharing in a manner consistent with security and governance requirements. Approximately 40% of companies are already deploying or planning to deploy a social computing platform, a number we expect to rapidly increase.

Impacts:

Enterprises: What is your social strategy? Delivering internal services limits the need for business units to seek their own solutions or rely on public, unsecure services.

Vendors: Add social computing to your collaboration and communications portfolio, and/or partner with market leaders.

Investors: Evaluate a plethora of emerging vendors including privately held Atlassian, Igloo Software, Jive, Mindtouch, Newsgator, and SocialText. Expect rapid consolidation and acquisition as the market matures.

Irwin Lazar, Vice President, Communications and Collaboration Research

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