Last week Bob Evans at InformationWeek caused a stir by publishing a list of the Top 20 Most Influential Tech Vendors. The list included the usual suspects including Google, IBM, EMC, and VMware, but also a few surprises – Microsoft came in at a relatively low 11th place, while SlapFu partner Jive Software was just behind them in 13th place.
You may be scratching your head about the list and asking yourself why Microsoft ranked so low, and what has pushed a small, start-up vendor such as Jive to join the big boys as one of most influential technology vendors in the world.
Bob Evans explains his approach lining up with the fact that “vendors from outside the traditional enterprise bubble have come crashing in with unconventional ideas that have jarred conventional thinking and approaches.”
When you think about it, the fact that Microsoft is dropping towards the bottom of that list is really not a surprise. It’s indicative of a paradigm shift happening in enterprise software today, as companies are revolting against a decade of lost innovation and productivity. The adoption of social media, the rise of mobile devices, a migration to cloud computing and virtualization are dramatically driving down the use of PCs along with Microsoft’s relevance in the enterprise.
The fact that an up and coming vendor such as Jive is on the list at all might be surprising but is a consequence of a related shift happening in the enterprise: the rise of social business.
Our adoption of social media as consumers is pervasive and unquestioned (in the last few months alone, Facebook has reached 500 million users, Twitter has surpassed its 15 billionth tweet, and LinkedIn has topped 80 million users). The corporate world is finally starting to react, as companies are looking to get meaningful breakthroughs in revenue, cost cutting and innovation. Gartner recently released their Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2011, with Social Communications and Collaboration at the top of the list. Gartner predicts that by 2016, social technologies will be integrated with most business applications.
After a decade of IT malaise in which the biggest innovations came in infrastructure, we are about to see a monumental shift in the way the enterprise uses software to get business done. A more “human” way.
Social Business is the new way to business. This is not Facebook fan pages, or Twitter accounts, but a fundamental change in the way we engage with employees, customers, partners and suppliers.
As Jive CEO Tony Zingale says, “As technology has become pervasive in our personal lives, we’ve learned that sharing information doesn’t require Word documents and endless email. We’ve learned that it can actually be enjoyable to use software. We’ve come to expect that we can find the right person at the right time and that interesting information will find us. We’ve come to believe that companies will treat us as individuals, not manage us. Finally, we’ve come to expect information real-time from multiple sources, including our peers. And we have a megaphone to use if we are not happy.”
