Open Source Social Software: Gartner on Open Source Products
On the 24th of October Gartner released the Team Collaboration and Social Software Magic Quadrant by Nikos Drakos. The document report about a revitalized collaboration support market, including also some open source products.
Nice start by Maszcha & J
While Gartner did yawn on Open Source BI, this Magic Quadrant includes products from less-established vendors, and eventually open source products got their chance. More important Drakos paid attention to the presence of independent activities adding value to the core product, where open source add-ons can play a decisive role.
Deki Wiki (MindTouch) originally based on MediaWiki, ICE core (SiteScape), Movable Type (Six Apart), SocialText (SocialText) and Twiki (Twiki.net) got all mentioned.
Ross Mayfield is pretty happy, that SocialText is considered the most visionary provider and behind only Microsoft, BEA and IBM in execution.
This tells me that if we want to be the leader we need to demonstrate better execution (mind you, I’m not taking out IBM next year, but it is good feedback). SuiteTwo, of which we are a core component, also scored well in vision but has a way to go in execution.
Execution. Open Source firms need to work hard on that, and it is a general issue. The absence of “horizontal” players in Europe, such as SpikeSource of the above mentioned SuiteTwo, is an open issue.
Getting back to Gartner, I am looking forward to read “Open Source Magic Quadrant”, Magic Quadrant reporting more open source specific information about those products. As seen with Social Software there are a lot of open source products that are enterprise ready, so a qualification method allowing to differentiate the open source numerous candidates is needed.
A good starting point would be the QSOS metrics. Should I elaborate it further?
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