We’re excited that Forrester Research Inc. named tibbr as a Leader in Activities Streams in “The Forrester Wave™: Activities Streams, Q2 2012” report.

In many ways, it’s an indicator of how far enterprise social has come. Businesses are moving away from using standalone content management systems and turning to private social networks that integrate with their current business solutions. With tibbr activity streams, employees receive all the content and data relevant to how they work and interact with it in real time. Activity streams connect employees to each other and relevant information, all from an intuitive social interface.

Forrester’s recognition also shows how far our product has come in a competitive landscape, especially given that tibbr GA-launched in January 2011, much later than any of the other enterprise social software vendors mentioned in the wave.

Forrester highlighted us as one of the few vendors offering an on-premise model as well as private cloud, SaaS, and hybrid, where we can fully integrate with existing business applications. The on-premise offering is critical for many of our large customers where security is a concern, and integrating sensitive data from business applications with a cloud-based social platform is not an option. For example, many of our customers located outside of the U.S., cannot host their social platform in a data center based only in the U.S., nor do they want to move sensitive information from SharePoint, Oracle Expense or other systems to a cloud-based social network. (continued…)

This week we had the pleasure of listening to two thought leaders in the field of social computing: Rob Koplowitz, Vice President at Forrester Research; and Randy Wagner, Drilling Advisor and Knowledge Manager at Apache Corp. Rob and Randy joined us for a webinar on knowledge management and the adoption of enterprise social. Today we’re sharing Rob’s discussion on the macro trends driving adoption of social in the enterprise and next week we’ll be sharing Randy’s presentation on Apache’s approach to implementing enterprise social, how it accelerated information sharing and ultimately cut trouble costs.

Here are some highlights from Rob’s presentation on why organizations need enterprise-ready internal social networking:

Knowledge is a huge differentiator: “Better management to knowledge, is something that will be able to differentiate my organization, make me fundamentally more efficient than my competition.”

Integration with systems: “Systems don’t talk to humans very well. … The information in those systems is under utilized by knowledge workers. And, we’ve been looking for a really long time for the appropriate distribution for that information and increasingly that looks like an activity stream. (continued…)