Traditional enterprise applications are coming out of their ‘introverted’ backends and going social and mobile. They are evolving to include features that foster easy collaboration and information sharing among employees. Static corporate intranets, once one-sided communication tools, are now becoming dynamic with two-way communication tools

Not long ago, social media applications got the step-motherly treatment in enterprises. While some CIOs neglected it, others weren’t sure whether to embrace or wrestle. Things have changed much since then. While the latent demand was always there, the real potential and momentum has built up only in the last two years. Until then, customers were dabbling around with some of these social tools. This year software vendors are seeing more mature customers who are seriously considering integrating social media in their organizations.

The global market for enterprise social software was worth just USD 0.9 billion in 2011, but IDC predicts this will rise to USD 4.5 billion over the next five years. Sales of social collaboration software are set to grow more than 40 percent a year till 2016. IDC also expects social software to encroach and possibly replace other collaboration applications throughout the forecast period, with sales growing at a CAGR of 43 percent

According to most vendors InformationWeek spoke with, customers are increasingly showing the desire to integrate social apps with their current applications. So, most of the technologies offered in the market today have the ability to link up to their existing intranets without ripping or replacing them. Biggies like IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP and Salesforce are all chasing this market opportunity. But there are also smaller players like MangoSpring and Saba.

IBM’s product is called Connections. Elaborating on the features of the social software, Himanshu Goyal, Country Manager- IBM Social Business & Collaboration Solutions, IBM India/ South Asia says, “It (IBM Connections) has the ability to extract the content and make it available in a certain form, or the ability to connect to the customers’ ERPs or HR systems. The beauty of our technology is that we give the most modern social business tools to our customers without them having to rip and replace anything, but utilize the content or the pre-work they would have done in the past. As a matter of fact, we pretty much give the ability to use all the features, which we get on the three popular social networking sites from a Facebook, LinkedIn or a Twitter perspective.”

Today, mundane intranets, which were one-sided communication tools, with static content have become dynamic and two-way communication tools

Himanshu Goyal, Country Manager- IBM Social Business & Collaboration Solutions, IBM India/South Asia

Web applications company Zoho says it does two things when it comes to “social” in their enterprise applications. “First, integrating external social tools and second, building social features into the applications. Both are equally important. Regarding integrating with external social channels, our enterprise applications like Zoho CRM, Zoho Support, etc., contextually integrate with external apps like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn where information about a customer/prospect is pulled in from external channels and presented within the enterprise apps,” says Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist, Zoho.

To make enterprise applications social, two things are important — integrating external social tools and building social features into the applications

Raju Vegesna Chief Evangelist, Zoho

Zoho claims a sizeable number of their customers to be using their Twitter and Facebook integrations to offer customer support using these social channels. “While adding a lead or prospect to the CRM system, they are linking that user to their Facebook and LinkedIn profile so that they know all the recent updates from their customers from these external social channels,” says Vegesna.

USING SOCIAL MEDIA APPS

There are numerous ways in which enterprises can make use of social media. One of the simplest examples is how the HR department uses it for employee on-boarding. “When new employees join, it’s quite a mundane task for the HR department to keep training and re-training people. So with such tools what you could do is give an employee a login and password the moment he/ she joins and he/she would actually have access to the content, including videos, static content and ability to see himself in the hierarchy — and to connect with people. So essentially the mundane intranets which were one-sided communication tools with static content have now become dynamic and two-way communication tools,” says Goyal of IBM.

Sanjay Manchanda, Director - Microsoft Business Division, Microsoft India believes the social part has to be intimately woven into the fabric of the tools that people already use. “We have to create a connected social experience across the enterprise. Tools like Microsoft Lync have made it possible to have remote workers work as if they are no longer remote. They can see and hear their co-workers, have real-time conversations and share content as easily as if they sat next to each other. In some organizations almost every worker is remote at some point — they work at hours that enable them to do both — spend time with their family, and be available to work the hours needed to achieve their goals,” says Manchanda.

In India, Microsoft has customers such as Infosys, MindTree, L&T Infotech, Wipro and Aditya Birla Financial Services that have built social networking sites within their enterprises. For example, MindTree has chosen Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 for building PeopleHub, which is designed to integrate the social networking capabilities of SharePoint, such as blogs, wikis, discussion forums, and communities. Infosys developed Infy Bubble using SharePoint 2010 and FAST Search. Infy Bubble today hosts about 80,000 profiles, 3,00,000 connections and has helped Infoscions tap into a larger talent and knowledge pool.

We believe that social part has to be intimately woven into the fabric of the tools that people already use

Sanjay Manchanda, Director - Microsoft Business Division, Microsoft India

In his article titled ‘Microsoft Office 2013 built for social sharing’ InformationWeek-Brainyard correspondent David Carr says social and cloud collaboration star in both the new consumer version of Office 365, enabled by SkyDrive and Skype, and the business versions built around SharePoint and Lync. (To read the full article, visit: http://bit.ly/NYiBbr).