Forrester Sr. Analyst Jeremiah Owyang discusses the findings of their latest report on community platforms, “Forrester Wave: Community Platforms, Q1 2009” on his blog. He also provides a lot of information about their methodology, including how they reduced the number companies to include from 100 to 9. The full report is only for Forrester clients, but Jeremiah provides a summary which you can read here. Here’s a snip from his post:
What did we find? First of all, this is still a very young market, with the average tenure of a company being just a few years in community. Despite the immaturity, we evaluated nine and were impressed with Jive Software and Telligent Systems who lead the pack because of their strong administrative and platform features and solution offerings.
Next, a group of vendors ranked as strong performers: KickApps and Pluck enable large Web sites to quickly scale with social features. Also in the strong performer category, Awareness, Lithium Technologies, and Mzinga enable brands to build branded communities while LiveWorld offers brands agency-like services. While Leverage Software is not on par with the others in the category, they are ideal for medium-sized businesses and due to their cost-effective platform could have a strong position during this economic downturn.
