UC
Also from Enterprise 2.0 last week came a number of vendor announcements indicating growing momentum for integrating social software with unified communications applications. Cisco unveiled Quad, it’s social networking platform that integrates UC applications such as presence and conferencing into an enterprise social tool. Jive took the wraps of version 4.5 of its social business software, adding support for IM/presence integration with IBM Lotus Sametime and Microsoft Office Communications Server. And Saba Software, historically in the learning management and web conferencing space, came out with Saba Live, bridging the worlds of workforce management, web conferencing and social computing. All of these products are designed to bring Facebook-like collaboration behind the firewall; integrating blogs, wikis, microblogs, activity streams, and other social features in a manner consistent with enterprise security, compliance, and governance policies. Approximately 20% of companies are now deploying social computing platforms while more than 58% use individual social applications and 35% are developing or have an enterprise social computing strategy. Taken together, all these announcements underscore the need for those responsible for social software as well as those managing UC applications to work together to take advantage of the opportunities to integrate social and UC.
