Analyst firm International Data Corporation (IDC) has published its 2012 MarketScape report profiling and ranking the leading providers in the worldwide enterprise social software market. This new research indicates that as use cases of enterprise social software broaden and mature, organisations are looking to engage internal users and customers in an ongoing conversation, inside and outside the firewall. 

With this, activity streams, discussion forums, blogs and wikis are becoming an assumed functionality of enterprise social software to facilitate collaboration in real time and in context.

"Over the past few years, the broader social business landscape has seen sweeping changes in use cases, adoption, technology, and attitudes," said Vanessa Thompson, research manager for IDC's Enterprise Social Networks and Collaborative Technologies. 

"Along with the maturity of social as a customer and engagement channel, use cases have grown into some broad categories, namely customer experience, sales enablement, digital commerce, socialytics, innovation management, and enterprise social networks (ESNs)."

IDC named Socialcast from VMware and Yammer as Leaders, closely followed by Salesforce.com's Chatter as a Major Player. Other Major Players included IBM Connections, Igloo Software, BlueKiwi, Huddle, Newsgator Social Sites, Socialtext, Telligent, SAP, and Cisco WebEx Social.

"Eventually social software will no longer be called out as a separate software market because social capabilities will be embedded across the application portfolio to support the system of relationship," added Thompson. 

"Vendors will start releasing applications that have the ability to embed inside other applications, but customers will also need to integrate and consolidate internal applications to support the change in the nature of work that social capabilities bring."