Michael MaozOK, I’ve managed to complete another magic quadrant, this one on Field Service. Field Service Optimization is my pet research area. I try not to do too much in it because it is an area of clear value, high ROI, and business transformation. That seems to be enough to lower its profile in any company.
But the upcoming Magic Quadrant I am involved in with Adam Sarner, Ed Thompson, Gene Alvarez and others is Social CRM. Some of you are going to be uncomfortable with this new research because it is groundbreaking and inherently loose around the edges. Something is clearly happening in business software. Organizations are struggling to engage customers, understand where they struggle, understand their needs, and provide them the tools to interact with one another in a coherent and enjoyable way.
A new wave of software suppliers is emerging, with crazy names worthy of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Go ahead: Google that. But amongst the leaders and visionaries in this quest of fostering greater collaboration inside and outside the enterprise are the software vendor equivalent of Macbeth’s Weird Sisters – always witnessing, always prophesying, but not actually delivering anything.
I’ve marveled over my many years in industry at the glacial pace of innovation inside of the long-established software companies. Meeting with their leaders can seem a bit like Kabuki theater – lots of pomp and color and lights. But the substantial innovation is coming from startups around the world in the Social CRM space. The large software houses are focused on the big money: on enterprise software to an entire government at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, or product lines that could earn them a billion dollars in repeatable business.
Let’s face it: innovation is messy and starts off slowly, and its value is rarely accurately understood until it snowballs at an increasing pace. And that is when the large enterprise application vendors do what they do best: acquire.
Category: CRM Customer Centric Web Innovation and Customer Experience Leadership Social CRM Social Networking Social Software Tags:
7 responses so far ↓
1 Brian Vellmure June 11, 2010 at 12:39 am
Michael,
Looking forward to seeing your research. If Gartner is doing a Magic Quadrant, that must mean validation of the space.
Best regards,
Brian
2 Erica McClenny June 11, 2010 at 9:50 am
I’m interested to see your “findings” on the Social CRM space. Personally, I think it’s a mess and there is a new definition arising, B2G (Group) it’s not one on one engagement or targeting. It’s group conversation and influencing of other groups.
I think the definition of CRM is a bit lost and undefined in the Social Space. My companies president has a deep history in traditional CRM (He built and sold Ceres to NCR) and we’re taking that knowledge and applying it to our product minus the broadcast styling.
I’d love you opinion on our enterprise solution. We might have the sex appeal of a fancy dashboard but we actually do deliver a software that works and is scalable. We also have a team that has an enterprise background, history and passion. It’s not just some super smart tech junkies coding away…LOL
3 Chase McMichael June 12, 2010 at 2:53 pm
Michael will your report being mostly covering Social Monitoring (Listing) companies? What about Social Intelligence?
@ChaseMcMichael
4 Jacob Morgan June 13, 2010 at 9:12 am
Looking forward to reading this. I’ve been meeting with many vendors in the space and looking forward to seeing the Gartner research.
5 Blake Cahill June 15, 2010 at 1:33 am
Michael – I am looking forward to actually seeing the output of this Magic Quadrant as the number of vendors and the ecosystem of folks being researched is broader than what other analyst firms are focused on. As there are multiple Gartner like firms updating their existing Social Business Intelligence/Platform vendor research it will be interesting to see Gartner’s take on the space with this inaugural Quadrant.
Cheers,
@bcahill
@visible_tech .
6 Michael R Roberts June 15, 2010 at 4:57 pm
I`m just one more who is looking forward seeing things about magic quadrant. Very, very true and interesting thing in this post.
7 Tim Jones June 16, 2010 at 6:15 am
Michael:
Spot on with your analysis. We’re seeing from our operations at Buzzient a significant gap between the capabilities of enterprise app vendors and current market needs. Right now, customers are trying to resolve this through bringing in Social CRM tools that are “outboard motors” to existing app stacks. It will be interesting to see how this resolves over time.