Trusted Advice for Software Providers

As a key decision maker in your company, you have access to an abundance of data and information about macro-economic trends, competitors, and current and potential customers. In fact, there is more information available than you can process and make sense of. You need a trusted advisor to whom you can direct questions and get answers that enable you to understand the current realities and emerging trends in the marketplace.

Dow Brook is that trusted advisor. Our core competency is filtering out the noise in the information stream and making sense of volatile enterprise software markets. Through our Insight On-Demand Subscription Service, we provide the critical insight that executives at software companies need right now to make sound decisions on strategic and tactical issues. Please see our Services page for more details.

Dow Brook, Ipswich MA

Dow Brook, Ipswich MA

Dow Brook Publishes White Paper on Collaboration and Activity Streams

Dow Brook Advisory Services is pleased to announce the publication of a new white paper, titled Adrift in the Current: Effective Business Collaboration Requires more than an Activity Stream. PDF versions of the paper may be downloaded from either Dow Brook's Resources page or from the website of the paper's sponsor, Igloo Software, free of charge.

Enterprise Social Software and the Facebook Effect - Round Three

Here we go again.

Facebook CEO and founder, Mark Zuckerberg, announced his company's newest offering, Facebook Home, at a press conference today (See this Mashable article for a good overview and hands-on video). Home – a meta-application designed for use exclusively on (select Android OS) mobile devices – has the potential to change enterprise computing as significantly as did the original Facebook NewsFeed.

A few years ago, nearly every provider of fledgling enterprise social software described their offering as "Facebook for the enterprise". Indeed, every product or service in the

IBM Connects Social

IBM held it's 20th annual collaboration conference last week. In the culmination of its gradual retirement of the Lotus brand, IBM changed the name of the event from Lotusphere to IBM Connect.

The new name is highly appropriate, as it has multiple layers of meaning. IBM's social software, packaged and sold as IBM Connections, is focused on connecting people with others and with information.

Microsoft and Yammer: Dow Brook Answers the Burning Questions

Microsoft's acquisition of Yammer, rumored for days and formally announced yesterday, has left everyone – enterprise software buyers and competing vendors, as well as industry and financial analysts – with many questions about the rationale for the deal and its $1.2 billion price tag. This post provides Dow Brook's analysis and answers to several of those questions.

On June 14 (the morning after the acquisition rumors surfaced), Dow Brook published a note for our Insight On-Demand advisory service clients, which provided our take on what the potential deal would mean, if consummated, and how

Yammer Bangs On oneDrum

Yammer announced yesterday that it has acquired oneDrum, a UK-based provider of file sharing and collaborative editing tools for Microsoft Office users. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed. oneDrum's technology and people will be integrated into Yammer.

 
In a briefing on the acquisition yesterday, Yammer CTO and Co-Founder, Adam Pisoni, stated that the acquisition was made to quickly accelerate movement toward Yammer's primary strategic objective – to be the social layer, spanning key enterprise applications, in which its customers (and their extended business networks)

Lotusphere 2012: IBM Demonstrates the Power of the Platform, Simplified

Lotusphere 2012 demonstrated that IBM is in good position to be a provider of choice for social business software. The work that they've done over the last year strongly differentiates their interaction platform and should positively affect its adoption by customers. IBM's refusal to acknowledge the old, limiting tradeoff between platform complexity and user experience should accelerate the consolidation of the Enterprise Social Software market in the second half of 2012. It may also more firmly establish IBM as a leader in the Web Experience software category and spark renewed interest in its Notes/Domino messaging and Sametime unified communications offerings.

Telligent Gains Leverage on Its Cloud and Mobile Roadmaps

Telligent Systems, Inc. announced yesterday that it had acquired Leverage Software, a competing provider of enterprise social capabilities used to support communities and customer relationship management efforts. Leverage's brand and people will be integrated into Telligent starting immediately, and technology integration will occur some time in 2012. Telligent gains several strategic pieces that will strengthen its offerings through the acquisition of Leverage, including cloud, mobile, and analytics technology; people with .NET and iOS development skills; and some marquee customers.

Salesforce.com Acquires Rypple, Enterprise Social Layer Vendors Shudder

Salesforce.com announced yesterday afternoon that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Rypple, a Toronto-based provider of cloud-based social performance management capabilities to enterprises, by April 30, 2012. The intended acquisition gives Salesforce.com a toehold in the Human Capital Management (HCM) space, as well as further diversification from its roots as a vendor of cloud-based CRM services. Salesforce.com's anticipated integration of Rypple and Chatter should make pure-play enterprise social software vendors shudder, as it will further demonstrate how the integration of status updates and activity streams into digitized, people-centric business processes can be packaged for sale to buyers in a specific corporate role or function, rather than to the ephemeral potential purchaser known as "the business". This acquisition, in combination with SAP's buyout of SuccessFactors (and the functionality from its Cubetree acquisition) may be seen, in hindsight, as the tipping point for rapid consolidation of the market for enterprise social software.

Why Has Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Plateaued?

There is a growing body of evidence that suggests that the adoption of social technologies has leveled off in large organizations. Will Enterprise 2.0 move on to, and past, the critical tipping point or will its adoption remain where it is now (or even decline)? Before that question can be answered, another must be addressed. Why has adoption halted here?

Cloud Content Management Vision is Quickly Becoming Reality

Announcements by some major enterprise software providers yesterday and today have strongly validated the power and accuracy of a vision first articulated 19 months ago – Cloud Content Management.

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