Social Business Software

I love it when, for the third time in the past week, we get off the phone with a customer of our Social Business Software (SBS) competitor, Jive Software, and we hear that they are playing the same games that Enterprise software companies have played for the last thirty years:

- Everything is a "customization"
- Customizations cost lots of money
- Organizations need to rely on the company or its partners to perform customizations

One of the most common complaints that we hear from our prospects & customers when in the market for Community Software and/or Social Business Software is that the licensing models of the proprietary vendors are very inflexible. They often end up charging their customers on a per user basis, annually, - and on top of that, bundle in typical proprietary software maintenance costs.

A few of days ago I blogged about a conversation I had with an industry analyst. A key quote I heard from him that conversation was this: "The feature set for social business software is now pretty well known." And again today I heard from another well-known social business software consultant that he thinks "There's not much IP (intellectual property) in social business software; it's not hard software to create."

If I were an analyst today (I was one at Forrester in the mid 1990's), I'd say it's time to write a complete report about what this means for enterprises.

What it means is that organizations should be cautious about buying into expensive proprietary solutions, since those products - and companies - are now highly vulnerable to being commoditized.

Ok, so yes - the title is a bit misleading in one sense; but in another it's totally true. Let me explain.

While briefing an industry analyst yesterday, I realized that the analyst was presuming that an organization needed to have adopted Drupal in some way before they would could use Drupal Commons. This is not the case.