Forrester has released its 2010 The Forrester Wave: Community Platforms report by analyst Melissa Parrish. Jive and Lithium took top honors this year. Forrester also evaluated KickApps, Telligent Systems, and Mzinga. The firm concluded that those five vendors have the most mature products and have a lead on the rest of the crowded marketplace. The report focused on vendors providing externally facing community platforms, not internal collaboration suites.
Forrester changed its criteria this year. The firm created a large list of features (such as polls, analytics, and access controls) that were required even to be considered. Forrester also preferred vendors that provide services geared specifically towards marketers.
It evaluated vendors against 60 different criteria, which it categorized into three groups:
- Current offering
- Strategy
- Market presence
All five vendors Forrester selected had a large customer base of marketers, experience working with large enterprises, strong revenue, and solid retention rates.
Awareness and Pluck were included in the Wave report last year, but not this year. Forrester didn’t add any new vendors this year.
As we reported last week, Jive earned the highest marks in three Gartner reports: Magic Quadrant 2010 for Workplace Social Software, Magic Quadrant for Externally Facing Social Software 2010 and Magic Quadrant for Social CRM 2010. It was also considered the leader in last year’s Wave for community platforms.
Forrester also found that 24% of the large enterprises polled are currently implementing or piloting programs using a community platform, and 31% are planning a pilot in the next 12 months.
