Microstreams In Business: Status Update And Pointers

The Microstreams In Business research project has been going along very well, especially since I was able to meet with a lot of vendors at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. We have a number of the vendors participating in the project, including

  • IBM
  • Socialcast
  • Newsgator
  • Yammer
  • Socialwok
  • Coffee Bean Technology
  • Threadbox
  • BantamLive
  • BlueKiwi
  • Socialtext
  • and we are in discussions with many others, including Workstreamer, Cisco, and Salesforce.

The study is a combination of direct research on vendors products (by scenario development) and a survey. I intend to expand on the straw poll I conducted at the outset of the research (see Initial Straw Poll On Microstreams In Business) with a more detailed survey that I plan to release later this week or next.

In July I plan to walk through the companies’ mocked-up responses to the scenarios I devised (see Microstreams In Business: Scenarios For Product Evaluation), and then to spend August writing up the results.

The report will be structured with in three sections:

Introduction — An overview of the project, definitions, and an overview of the marketplace for social tools in the enterprise, with particulalr attention to microstreams.

For each participant, a chapter will examine the company’s offering, covering the following:

Positioning — In essence, this is a quick look at how the vendor positions its product. Is it integrated with other products of the company or partners, or is it a dedicated standalone offering? Is it targeted for specific industries or functions? Of course, all of this is taken with a grain of salt, since it is relatively unproven: it’s just an assertion by the vendor.

Scenario-Based Evaluation — The second part of the analysis is based on several high-level scenarios that I am developing (see below), which are intended to cover a reasonable range of use cases that will demonstrate the breadth and depth of the offerings. The vendors will have a reasonable time — several weeks at least — to mock-up example implementations of the scenarios. I hope to have the opportunity to walk through these with representatives of the vendors companies, either face-to-face or remotely, and gathering screenshots for the final report. Vendors can make the scenarios as simple or as complex as they’d like, for example if a vendor wants to demonstrate special functionality, or integration with other tools.

Cross Product Analysis and Segmentation — The third part of the analysis forms the second half of the research activity, which is a cross product analysis of the capabiiities of the various products evaluated, and their segmentation into different niches. I anticipate that some products will naturally gravitate toward sales and marketing outreach, while others will be better suited for internal project coordination. My goal in this is not to develop a single list of products ordered from best to worst based on some hypothetical customer. On the contrary, my belief is that there are a wide variety of user profiles, and any given product may fit one or more well, but no product is likely to match the needs of all customers. Over the next few weeks I will also be developing a more detailed survey to try to establish more clearly what features and functionality potential customers desire, and how they cluster.

In September I will be holding a series of webinars to explore the results, as well as selling the report. There will be a fee to attend the webinars, and the report will be retailing for $195. Subscribers to the Microstreams In Business research will receive

  • a copy of the final report, planned for September 2010 release;
  • two seats at MIB webinars: currently planning on three or four in September;
  • a two-hour web briefing discussing the findings and their application to the specific company’s needs.

The full research sponsorship will be $500 in September; for those signing up in July the cost is only $450. Those interested can contact me at stoweboyd AT gmail DOT com.