Another interesting chart from the recent Lecko ESN study shows collaboration tools by how they facilitate Productivity in two dimensions (Social functions, Business line functions).

The three groupings are as follows:

• A – Solutions focused on personal and collective productivity (e..g, Google Apps, Jive, MS Office 365+Yammer, IBM Connections, Sitrion +SP, Microsoft Sharepoint 2013)
• B – Tools that integrate their collaborative and social functions with the online office suites of Google, IBM or Microsoft (e.g. KnowledgePlaza, blueKiwi, Atlassian Confluence, eXo platform, etc.)
• C – Purely social solutions not operating in productivity but encourages employee interaction.

My thoughts on this is that this chart focuses on gaining market acceptance by their own primacy (those in A), and the challengers who gain the extra push from integrating with known major suites (B). Those in (C) are standalone.  Some of these stem from their roots in document and knowledge management and evolution into social platforms.