Forrester Research released its Forrester Wave report for Enterprise Social Platforms, Q3 2011 recently and named the top enterprise social companies, as they see it.

Forrester found, not surprisingly to me, that companies are looking for ways to capture and re-use knowledge, maintain human connections in an increasingly disparate workforce, and at the same time they are feeling pressure to update enterprise systems to accommodate younger workers used to using technology in a social fashion.

The report named IBM (NYSE: IBM), Jive, Newsgator and Telligent as the strongest offerings to date with Atlassian (Confluence), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) (SharePoint) and Socialtext offering what the report called "competitive offerings." Finally, the report named Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) and OpenText as companies looking to build social functionality into a broader portfolio of offerings.

The report used a number of defining criteria to come up with its rankings including products that offered a breadth of social capabilities, provided five reference customers in production and finally which vendors were most relevant to Forrester's customers.

The report didn't offer any big surprises, of course, and you can take it as far as you wish. It doesn't include any of the newer cloud vendors for instance and its reliance on what Forrester customers use is a limiting criterion, in my view. But if you're looking for a starting point to evaluate some of the better known enterprise social offerings, this will give you some insight.

For more information:
- see the Forrester Wave Enterprise Social Platforms page

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