{"id":2428,"date":"2016-12-21T16:12:39","date_gmt":"2016-12-21T16:12:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/enterprise-social-comes-roaring-back.html"},"modified":"2016-12-21T16:12:39","modified_gmt":"2016-12-21T16:12:39","slug":"enterprise-social-comes-roaring-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rbsitsoftwaresolution.in\/blog\/enterprise-social-comes-roaring-back.html","title":{"rendered":"Enterprise social comes roaring back"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

You\u2019ll be forgiven if you missed it, but lost in the avalanche of this year\u2019s tech news, enterprise social\u00a0software made an impressive comeback. Led by products like Slack<\/a>, Workplace by Facebook<\/a> and Microsoft Teams<\/a>, a software category that had been languishing for the last several years, suddenly came alive.<\/p>\n

A decade ago, as social software\u00a0emerged, it was\u00a0coined Enterprise 2.0<\/a> to describe products\u00a0based on Web 2.0 consumer tools like blogs and wikis, which were making their way into business and attempting to transform the way employees\u00a0communicate and collaborate. An industry developed\u00a0with early companies like Yammer, Jive and Socialcast (to name but a few examples).<\/p>\n

Jive was the only pure Enterprise 2.0 player to go public, IPOing in 2011<\/a>, but\u00a0there was also the inevitable consolidation as companies were sold. VMware bought Socialcast <\/a>in 2011. Microsoft bought Yammer for $1.2 billion<\/a> in 2012 \u2014 and so it went, as the space lost momentum.<\/p>\n

\"Social<\/p>\n

Enterprise social deal flow chart from 2012. Credit: Dion Hinchcliffe<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Cut me some Slack<\/h2>\n

Then came\u00a0the launch of Slack in 2013, and while we didn\u2019t know it at the time, it would prove significant. A year after launch,\u00a0the startup began attracting enormous chunks of\u00a0funding \u2014 garnering\u00a0more than $522 million in investment across four rounds between April 2014 and April 2016. In fact, the April, 2016 funding round was for $200 million on a $3.8 billion valuation<\/a>. Today, they are up to 4 million active daily users<\/a> (of which 1.25 million are paying).<\/p>\n

That kind of growth tends to get noticed and some important\u00a0companies were paying attention. In October,\u00a0Workplace by Facebook<\/a>, the company\u2019s enterprise social application, opened for business. Facebook\u00a0is hoping to differentiate itself<\/a> by being the communications tool for the entire company, not just a limited set of knowledge worker teams within a company.<\/p>\n

Not to be left out, Microsoft introduced Microsoft Teams in November<\/a>. Teams is also a social tool, but unlike its competitors, which take a\u00a0broader view of the enterprise social ecosystem, Microsoft is really focused on people communicating around Office 365 documents.<\/p>\n

Why now?<\/h2>\n

While the first wave of tools had similar functionality to today\u2019s, perhaps they came too soon for widespread enterprise adoption. Companies simply weren\u2019t ready for this type of open communication. What\u2019s more, many of them\u00a0predated the rise of the smartphone, which has itself transformed enterprise software and communication. When you combine mobility with social software and the cloud \u2014 and a geographically dispersed workforce \u2014 it may simply be that the time has finally come for more widespread adoption of these\u00a0kinds of tools.<\/p>\n

Certainly Microsoft, which began merging Yammer\u00a0with its popular SharePoint product right after buying it, recognized the advantages of collaboration. Teams is another attempt at building\u00a0that kind of community around Office 365, which was still in its earliest stages of development in 2012. As for Facebook, it simply didn\u2019t have the resources in the first wave to even think about the enterprise as a target \u2014 even though many of the early products were billed as \u201cFacebook for the enterprise.\u201d Today, with so much more money and engineering talent, it can more easily turn its attention to this market.<\/p>\n

Mobile, social and the cloud have been connected from the start, and perhaps all of these companies see a market that\u2019s more open to communications and collaboration tools than they were the first time around. Some heavy hitters are clearly betting that\u2019s the case.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Featured Image: John Lund<\/a>\/Getty Images<\/small><\/p>\n

Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunch\/social\/~3\/OZFxQz4lkv0\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You\u2019ll be forgiven if you missed it, but lost in the avalanche of this year\u2019s tech news, enterprise social\u00a0software made an impressive comeback. Led by products like Slack, Workplace by <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[10,7,14,15,6,12,11],"class_list":["post-2428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latest-update","tag-computer-news","tag-downloads","tag-microsoft-download-news","tag-networking-updates","tag-technology-update","tag-wordpress-plugin-download","tag-wordpress-theme-download"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t