Report: Big Idea
Why Your Organization
Should Buy a Collaboration
Platform Instead of Bestof-Breed Solutions
What to Consider When Planning Your Organization’s
Next Collaboration Infrastructure
By Alan Lepofsky
Vice President and Principal Analyst
Content Editor: R “Ray” Wang
Copy Editor: Maria Shao
December 11, 2015
Produced exclusively for Constellation Research clients
Table of Contents
Purpose and Intent ..................................................................................................3
Executive Summary .................................................................................................3
How the Innovation Life Cycle Hastens the Shift from Differentiation to Commoditization .4
Evolution of the Employee Collaboration Portfolio ........................................................5
Silos of Collaboration Hinder Ability to Effectively Get Work Done ..................................7
Why Collaboration Platforms Trump Standalone Solutions .............................................8
When Standalone Products Make Sense .................................................................... 10
Capturing the Best of Both Worlds ........................................................................... 11
Vendors Approach Collaboration Platforms from Different Angles ................................. 12
Conclusion: Preparing for the Next Wave of Innovation .............................................. 13
Parallax Points of View ........................................................................................... 14
By Holger Mueller, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research .......... 14
By Steve Wilson, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research ............ 15
Disclosures ........................................................................................................... 15
Analyst Bio: Alan Lepofsky ...................................................................................... 16
About Constellation Research .................................................................................. 17
© 2015 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved.
2
Purpose and Intent
“Should we use a group of products from a single vendor or purchase different features
from multiple specialized vendors?”
This question, otherwise known as “suites versus best-of-breed”, is one of the oldest and
most important that IT decision makers have to answer. But is the question still valid?
Suites are no longer proprietary offerings with long development cycles, but rather open
and extensible platforms which are frequently updated. Best-of-breed vendors can still fill
niche gaps, but their unique features can quickly be commoditized. Thus, a more accurate
question would now be “which platform should we be looking at, and are there niche
products that we should integrate into it?”
The purpose of this report is to show how collaboration platforms provide a more seamless
and secure user experience, while reducing costs and administrative complexities from
piecing together multiple tools. This report covers two important topics: 1) How vendors
are releasing software in much shorter cycles than before and 2) The advantages of
platforms over best-of-breed solutions.
This report offers insights into one of Constellation’s primary business research themes, the
Future of Work.
Executive Summary
When it comes to communication and collaboration platforms, the tool at the center of work
for the last few decades has been email. For most organizations, from small local businesses
to the world’s largest enterprises, that meant selecting one of three choices: Microsoft
Outlook/Exchange, IBM Notes/Domino or Google Gmail. But the days of email-centric
platform decisions have come to an end. Organizations face an inflection point as email’s
dominance fades and as the time has arrived to choose the next generation of tools that
will empower both individual productivity and team collaboration for the next decade. These
platforms will not be email-centric, but rather will take a more holistic approach to
integrating features such as messaging, chat, web-conferencing, social networking, filesharing, project management and ideally business process software into a
seamless experience.
Organizations must determine if they should buy a suite of products from a single vendor
or piece together tools from multiple vendors in a "best-of-breed" approach. While there
are benefits and challenges to both options, Constellation believes that overall a suite
approach remains the correct decision for most organizations. There is an important point
here, though; today’s cloud-centric suites are not the locked-down proprietary silos
their predecessors were. Instead, suites from the large vendors have become more open
and extensible, thus earning a shift in name from suite to platform.
© 2015 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved.
3
How the Innovation Life Cycle Hastens the Shift
from Differentiation to Commoditization
As with most technologies, collaboration software evolves through cycles of innovation. At
the start of each cycle, distinct features emerge. Software vendors use these new features
to differentiate themselves from the competition. As that cycle reaches maturity and others
products offer similar functionality, what was once a unique set of features evolves into a
commodity. In the past, software suites suffered from very long innovation cycles, often
spanning several years. It was during the period between two peaks of innovation, called
the opportunity gap (see Figure 1), that small companies (startups) would enter the scene
and provide features that were missing from the larger product suites. These niche products
are often referred to as “best-of-breed”.
Figure 1. The Innovation to Commoditization Lifecycle
One of the (perceived) advantages of using “best-of-breed” products is that employees get
access to new features before similar functionality is available on larger software platforms.
But that advantage is now being challenged. The innovation cycles that were once several
years long are now being shortened. Three reasons for this are:

Agile development dramatically shortens innovation cycles. Software
development teams have shifted to agile methodologies, dramatically reducing the
time it takes for even the largest vendors to deliver new features/tools. Companies
like Microsoft, IBM and Salesforce are now able to release new versions of software
several times per year as opposed to once every several years.

Cloud infrastructure takes out the friction in deployment. As organizations
move from software installed on-premises to cloud-based deployments, the testing
and deployment time for software is being dramatically reduced. Often, cloud (or
Software as a Service, SaaS) vendors don’t even provide customers a choice of when
to upgrade. As soon as new versions are ready, customers have access to
© 2015 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved.
4
them. Contrast that to having on-premises software for which organizations are
often several releases behind the newest available software and for which lengthy
testing is needed when it is time to upgrade.

The API economy supports modularity and orchestration. In the past, software
products were often developed in proprietary ways that made integration of multiple
tools a challenge, even with products from the same vendor. Today, many software
companies are taking an “API first” approach to their products, publicly exposing their
core services and using those APIs to build their own products. The availability of
these APIs right at the start, rather than as an afterthought, has enabled improved
integration from the UI level down to areas like security and authentication.
Evolution of the Employee Collaboration Portfolio
Using the innovation and opportunity gap model explained above, we can map out how the
various tools employees use to get their jobs done have been first introduced to the market
and then eventually become commoditized. The following diagram (see Figure 2) is not
meant to be an exact timeline of events, but rather provides an illustration of how cycles of
innovation flow from uniqueness to commodity, then repeat.
Figure 2. Examples of the Commoditization of Collaboration Tools

Cycle 1 - The Email-Centric Era: The first communication and collaboration
software everyone used at work was email. Then services started to pop up that
offered instant messaging (or chat) and web-conferencing tools as an additional way
to work. IBM and Microsoft recognized this trend and added (via build or buy) similar
services to their respective suites, reducing the need for third-party solutions to
deliver these features. But this took many years to occur and customers were slow
to adopt these new tools.

Cycle 2 - The Collaboration Era: Next, blogs and wikis were introduced as ways
for employees to openly share content instead of using email. Organizations looked
© 2015 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved.
5
to startups like Socialtext, PBWiki and JotSpot to add value to their existing tools.
But soon, blogs and wikis became common features available across most suites and
the need for these startups diminished.

Cycle 3 - The Social Network Era: While forums and communities have been
around for decades, it was really Facebook and Twitter that brought social networking
to the masses. Not long after their popularity soared, startups like Jive, SocialCast
and Yammer began offering enterprise social networking tools. The large suite
vendors realized this and soon IBM and Microsoft, along with Salesforce, Oracle, SAP,
Infor, Google and others began offering (via build or buy) their own social networking
features.

Cycle 4 - The File Sharing Era: With social networking in full swing, companies
started to realize that employees wanted to share more than just status updates.
They wanted to share files. While startups like Box and Dropbox started the
enterprise file sync and share market, IBM, Microsoft, Google and Citrix quickly
followed, each offering its own native file-sharing features. This has forced both Box
and Dropbox to focus more on application development than on pure file storage and
sharing. Similarly, as the amount of messages being shared via social networking
grew, it became apparent that structure was needed to organize the vast amounts of
questions and tasks that were being shared. Startups like Asana, Wrike, Trello,
Workfront and Clarizen stepped in to fill the needs by offering project management
tools that integrate tasks and collaboration. Vendors like SAP, Microsoft and
Salesforce have recognized this trend and are delivering social task management
features natively within their own platforms.

Cycle 5 - The Simplified Social Networking Era: 2015 has been the year of
simplified social networking or group chat. Companies are seeking new ways to
reduce the use of email, blogs and wikis and startups like Slack, Glip, HipChat,
FlowDoc and others have stepped in to fill the opportunity gap. However, just like in
the previous cycles, the large platform vendors (such as Cisco and Unify) have
recognized this trend and are all working on their own versions of these tools, leading
once again to commoditization.
What Figure 2 shows is that each time a new trend occurs in the collaboration market,
eventually the large platform vendors will catch up. Due to agile development and clouddelivered platforms, the duration of the opportunity gaps for startups is becoming shorter.
The best-of-breed vendors need to continuously innovate to stay ahead or they will
become commoditized one fail.
© 2015 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved.
6
Silos of Collaboration Hinder Ability to Effectively
Get Work Done
One of the main challenges employees are facing today is that there are too many tools to
use. The typical toolset for communication, collaboration and productivity now includes
email, calendar, contacts, tasks, blogs,
wikis, chat, social networks, VoIP calls, web
conferencing, file sharing, work processing,
spreadsheets, slides, note taking and more.
Add to that list the actual business process
software people use for sales, marketing,
support,
human
resources,
finance,
engineering, supply chain, etc. and it
becomes overwhelming.
If the software for each of these functions
comes from a different vendor, the
complexity increases. Figure 3 shows that each set of functionalities has its own
requirements for things like security, search and user experience.
Figure 3. Best-of-Breed Solutions Create Complex Environments
© 2015 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved.
7
The complexity results in five roadblocks to success:

Too many identities and passwords. While there are single sign-on solutions
available, the reality is that most employees struggle keeping up with multiple IDs
and passwords, each with their own set of rules.

Too much fragmentation. Too many tools result in people not knowing which to
use. For example, should something be emailed, blogged or posted in a social
network?

Uncertain security. As the number of tools increases, so does the complexity of
keeping information safe and secure. When you use multiple tools from different
vendors, information has to pass back and forth between their various data centers.

Inconsistent user interfaces. When a portfolio of tools come from different
vendors, each will have a different look and feel. While many are customizable, it’s
very complex to make multiple tools look and behave in the same way.

No unified search. Finding people, content and conversations becomes complex as
you add more tools to the mix.
Why Collaboration Platforms Trump Standalone
Solutions
So how do you deliver the best of modern collaboration, while reducing the complexity
challenges? Use a platform that seamlessly blends as many of these features into a single
user experience as possible. While no one platform will offer the best of all features, many
do provide “good enough” features for all but the most unique business cases. Platforms
excel at providing a common set of attributes (see Figure 4), from administration to user
interface across all of the tools in the portfolio.
Figure 4. A Consistent Experience Applied Across All Tools in the Platform
© 2015 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved.
8
A business can gain numerous benefits from using a single collaboration platform:

Administration - Reduce the cost and complexity for IT staff: Rather than
having to switch between a variety of tools, synchronize information, document
multiple procedures, etc., platforms provide core administration services such as
user and group management and compliance/governance that span across all
elements of the platform.

Development - Build applications and extend functionality: A common set of
APIs provided by a single vendor can be used to create applications that use
information from across the platform or extend the functionality of that platform.
Contrast this to having to use different programming languages and syntax from
multiple vendors as well as experiencing bottlenecks when vendors do not provide
access to certain components of their product.

Ecosystem - Integrate with everything and everyone: The most successful
platforms have large business partner networks and third-party developer
ecosystems. These extensions to vendors provide a variety of services from
purchasing advice to architecture/installation/administration to building additional
features and functions.

Identity - Reduce the struggle of multiple logons and passwords: We’ve all
struggled with forgetting an ID and password. The more tools you use, the more
complex the problem becomes. Each reset costs time and money. While there are
single sign-on solutions that can help reduce the problem, having a single identity
and password that provide access to all of the tools in a platform is a much simpler
solution.

Licensing - Spend time working, not negotiating: Platforms offer a single
contract instead of having to deal with multiple vendors. This usually results in a
much lower overall price than adding together services from multiple best-of-breed
solutions. It also removes the administration burden of dealing with multiple
renewals, each occurring at different times of the year, with different people to deal
with, different contract wording to get approved, etc.

Mobile - Provide and manage access to people on the move: It’s important that
tools be designed to support employees who work from locations other than a
traditional office. These mobile experiences need to tie together features into a
seamless and secure experience. Mobile device management from a single vendor is
less complex and resource intensive than trying to configure and manage multiple
tools from multiple vendors.

Search - Find the content and people you need: As the number of tools we use
increases, it is becoming more challenging to find the people, content
and conversations. A single search layer across a platform is far more effective than
having to perform multiple searches across different tools.

Security - Know that your data is safe: Organizations are more worried than ever
about the security and privacy of their data. A single platform reduces the complexity
© 2015 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved.
9
of knowing where your data is stored, who has access to it, how it can be encrypted,
and what certifications the tools and data center have. Also, when you tie together
multiple tools, information flows back and forth from one vendor to another, rather
than staying under the control and governance of a single source.

Support - Know who to call when things go wrong: No one wants to have to
call support, but when you do, it’s much simpler to call a single vendor than to deal
with multiple vendors. When piecing together best-of-breed solutions, which vendor
do you call when two components are not working together? Does each vendor offer
the safe service levels during the same times in the same languages?

User Interface/Experience - Provide a consistent look and feel:
After everything has been purchased, set up, and secured, what really matters the
most is if people use the software or not. A poor user experience will quickly
halt the adoption of any tool. The platform approach helps ensure a consistent look
and feel, common processes and workflows, single notifications streams and an
overall integrated experience in which tools seamlessly blend together.

Trust/Certainty - Build a lasting relationship: When dealing with smaller niche
software vendors, especially if they are considered best of breed, there is a risk that
a vendor may be acquired by another vendor. When this occurs, there is uncertainty
if the product will remain the product you chose or will morph into something that no
longer meets your needs.
When Standalone Products Make Sense
While platforms provide the advantages mentioned above, there are certainly times when
standalone products may be the right choice, at least in the short term before the
commoditization stage of the innovation lifecycle (see Figure 1). A standalone product might
be best when:

Emerging features are important: While platforms provide a robust feature set,
they may not provide the full functionality of a product that comes from a company
with a single focus. For example, the integrated file-sharing features of a platform
may not contain all the enterprise-content management features available in a tool
that just focuses on file-sharing. Chat, file-sharing, and task management are
examples of tools that first entered the market as standalone offerings before the
major platforms added these features. Yet, the best-of-breed vendors in each
category still remain viable options by staying a few steps ahead of the native
functionality in platforms.

Vertical solutions are nascent: Standalone vendors can differentiate themselves
from the generic features found in platforms by tailoring their offerings for specific
industry verticals. For example, the integrated social networking features in a
platform may lack some specific features offered by standalone vendors that focus
on healthcare, finance, law or government.
© 2015 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved.
10

The vendor name is recognized: If a standalone vendor can establish itself as the
industry leader during the first half of the innovation lifecycle (see Figure 1), it often
can earn a reputation as “the company organizations want to work with.”

You want to quickly pilot an idea: Standalone products are a good way to rapidly
pilot a new concept or technology without affecting the entire platform.

Language and geographical considerations are not addressed: Standalone
products may be able to more rapidly meet unique requirements that large platform
vendors do not prioritize on their roadmaps.
Capturing the Best of Both Worlds
It’s important to point out that purchasing a platform from a single vendor does not mean
you have completely eliminated the option of using a few best-of-breed products. Due to
the openness of today’s platforms, other tools can be integrated into them, and their
services can be extended to other tools (see Figure 5). However, note that as soon as you
leave the platform environment, you may encounter the complexities mentioned above,
such as security and inconsistent user experience.
Figure 5. Platforms Need to Be Open
© 2015 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved.
11
Vendors Approach Collaboration Platforms from
Different Angles
Now that we’ve highlighted the advantages of collaboration platforms, let’s look at the most
popular ways these benefits are delivered. The list below does not represent all the vendors
in each category, but is intended to provide an overview of each group. The category that
best suits your organization may depend on your company culture, aggressiveness in
deploying new technology (are you a leader or laggard?) and existing vendor relationships.

Office-Centric - Email + Productivity Suite + Social Networking: The most
popular approach to collaboration platforms has been to start with the vendors that
provide both email and productivity suites (word processor, spreadsheet and
presentation). This category is dominated by Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps for
Work and IBM Connections/Verse.

Communication-Centric - Instant Messaging + VoIP + Web-conferencing:
This group contains both mature telephony vendors like Cisco and Unify (formerly
Siemens Enterprise) as well as startups such as Fuze (now owned by ThinkingPhones)
and Redbooth. This group focuses more on real-time communication (not email and
files) enabling people to switch modes between chatting (text), voice calls and video
(1:1 or multi-person). The new breed of “persistent chatroom” vendors such as Slack,
Glip (now owned by RingCentral), HipChat and FlowDock could also be considered in
this category, but until they offer a more robust feature set, they are still niche
players, relying heavily on integrations to round out their feature sets.

Process–Centric - Enterprise Business Software + Social Networking: This
group seamlessly integrates collaboration features into the business process software
that employees use to get their jobs done. Examples include adding conversations
into the core functionality of the tools used by Sales, Marketing, Finance, Human
Resources, Supply Chain, and Customer Support. Leading vendors in this category
include Salesforce (with Chatter/Communities), SAP/Success Factors (with Jam),
Oracle (with Oracle Social Network) and Infor (with Mingle). Constellation refers to
these types of platforms as Purposeful Collaboration.

Project-Centric - Task Management + Social Networking: This group places
project management at the center of getting work done. These projects combine the
core features of task management (assignments, priorities, milestones) with the key
features of collaboration (conversations, file-sharing, profiles). Some of the most
popular vendors in this category include Asana, Workfront, Clarizen, ProjectPlace,
Trello, and Wrike.

Community-Centric - Communities + Integration: This category focuses on
conversations and knowledge sharing, both internally with employees as well as
externally with customers and partners. Vendors such as Jive, Lithium, Igloo, and
Bloomfire combine forums, file-sharing and social networking, but rely on integration
for real-time collaboration, document creation and project management features.
© 2015 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved.
12

Content-Centric – File-Sharing and Workflow: The final category is for the
software vendors that focus primarily on content. They then add
collaborative functionality such as conversations, task and workflow to the content,
plus features like security, search and application development APIs and SDKs.
This category includes vendors like Box, Dropbox, Adobe, and VMware/Airwatch.
Conclusion: Preparing for the Next Wave of
Innovation
As explained in Figure 1, the innovation and commoditization of features occur in cycles.
For each cycle, there are some organizations that quickly adopt the new innovative
technologies and others that wait until the commoditization stage. In the past, the early
adopters needed to look toward standalone or best-of-breed vendors in order to be the trail
blazers, as suites were slow to deliver new features. But that is no longer the case. Today’s
software platforms are updated far more frequently than the suites that preceded them.
Take, for example, the old PC versions of the Microsoft Office suite which used to release
versions every three or four years, compared to the Microsoft Office 365 platform which
now releases new features multiple times per year.
Constellation recommends the following steps in order to optimize your use of collaborative
technologies:

Inventory your current infrastructure: Document which platforms you have in
place and which best-of-breed products you are currently using.

Map where you are in the collaboration lifecycle: Using Figure 2, determine
which features your organization already has and which you have yet to provide. Do
you need to catch up to the industry or are you already leading the way?

Determine which type of platform best suits your needs: Using the five
categories mentioned above, decide which collaboration platform best matches the
needs of your organization. If you already have it in place, have you upgraded to the
most current version? Does your current deployment model suit your needs? For
example, do you need to migrate from on-premises to the cloud?

Remove redundant components: If any of the best-of-breed technologies you are
using have become native features of the platform(s) you choose, plan to either
migrate or sunset the best-of-breed applications.

Ride the innovation wave: As seen in Figure 1, there are always new cycles of
innovation and opportunity gaps that need to be filled. Research what is coming next
and decide which best-of-breed vendor integrates with your collaboration platform.
Armed with this knowledge, speak to your platform vendor to find out when it plans
on delivering similar functionality. If it is on the vendor’s near-term roadmap, you
may be able to wait for the vendor to deliver it.
If your organization has fallen behind, today’s platforms provide an easy method of catching
up as they include most of the innovative features that were previously delivered by best-
© 2015 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved.
13
of-breed vendors in earlier cycles. Remember, standalone solutions may deliver short-term
collaboration benefits, but often don’t drive long-term business value.
Parallax Points of View
By Holger Mueller, Vice
Constellation Research
President and
Principal
Analyst,
The pros and cons of best-of-breed versus suite create a never-ending debate that decision
makers need to face about enterprise software. In the past, the suites have always won
over time. The question is – will it be different this time? The main reason suites have won
in the past is that enterprises don’t want to be become systems integrators of different
solutions – or they don’t pay systems integrators to help them test and operate a cornucopia
of best-of-breed solutions.
Let’s look at what has really changed for enterprises in regard to the technology being used
by the vendors they are considering:

Cloud: All established enterprise software vendors are becoming cloud-based in
some form and shape. This creates an opportunity for early cloud adopters. But the
cloud changes delivery and consumption of enterprise software; it does not change
the integration challenge. Worse, integration tools for cloud-based solutions are also
in early stages and fully rely on the vendors to open interfaces. 1:0 for suites.

Best Practices: The best practices for the 21st century have not been established
yet. Businesses know how to run in an age of IT resources scarcity - something that
has been practiced until today – but not in an era of IT resources overabundance,
where computing and storage cost very little or close to nothing. The lack of the
established vendors supporting these new best practices, creates a door for in-house
software development and, at some point in the future, newly formed startups. 1:1
as best-of-breed scores.

People: Soon two-thirds of the world GDP will have to be supported by a worker to
retiree ratio of less than 2 to 1. This will have profound effects on manual work, even
skilled manual work. Even if enterprises can build modern next-generation software,
they may not be able to operate and maintain it. Aborted Big Data projects – though
working and successful – are a first indication of that trend. 2:1 for suites.

Data Gravity: In the future, less data will be moved around, but more code will
come to the data. As long as that code needs to comply with technology frameworks
to operate it that are not polyglot and universal, the code and tech stack options will
be limited. Which means that data gravity around tech stacks will limit choices on
software. 3:1 for suites.

Integration with Big Data: A very promising trend is to skip the whole integration
software challenge, dump all data of systems into Hadoop clusters, and query
information for next-generation applications from there. With technologies like Spark,
this may be faster than the relatively lengthy Hadoop queries we see today. And
© 2015 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved.
14
cheap computing in the cloud may even enable “automagical” relationship and
visualization results. Take a look at Amazon AWS QuickSight to see the forefront. 3:2
the best-of-breed score.
So it will remain a tight contest between best-of-breed and suite going forward. Appetiteto-own integration is a key indicator that will help executives decide which direction to lean.
At the same time, executives should not lose sight of the prize of successful enterprise
automation – a fit between intended best practices and the software they choose for their
enterprises.
By Steve Wilson, Vice
Constellation Research
President
and
Principal
Analyst,
As Alan Lepofksy suggests, complexity is the enemy of security. Increasingly, a singlesource security strategy makes sense, compared with the complexity of piecing together
best-of-breed. The large-scale platform providers can deliver best practice either because
they are investing massively in security and privacy R&D (look at Amazon, Google and
Salesforce, among others) and acquiring the specialists (in security, the most acquisitive
players include BlackBerry, EMC, Hewlett-Packard and IBM). M&A activity has been fast and
furious around all the critical elements of modern online services, such as mobile device
management and cloud encryption.
What exactly is “best-of-breed” in security today? Security is in the eye of the asset holder,
but it generally spans threat intelligence, a stable but fresh workforce, highly experienced
operators, data loss prevention, breach mitigation and recovery, software quality and
resilience, and state-of-the-art authentication.
Security problems almost always arise at the margins, at the rough edges created when
diverse sub-systems are brought together. A unified security suite, designed and
maintained close to the application suite, can provide harmony, stability and safety.
Disclosures
Your trust is important to us, and as such, we believe in being open and transparent about
our financial relationships. With our clients’ permission, we publish their names on our
website.
© 2015 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved.
15
Analyst Bio: Alan Lepofsky
Alan is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, Inc.
With almost two decades of experience in the collaboration software industry, Alan helps
organizations improve the way their employees work together to get their jobs done more
effectively. Alan’s primary research area, The Future of Work, includes:

Integrating collaboration and business processes, or Purposeful Collaboration

Structuring work with Social Task Management

Leveraging analytics and digital assistants to work more productively

The strategic impact of mobile computing on business transformation

Measuring workforce culture based on Digital Proficiency instead of age
Alan is an active blogger and speaker in the “Social Business” and “Future of Work”
communities, where he shares his thoughts on the business benefits of open communication
and collaboration.
Since 1993, he has been designing, marketing and helping customers deploy software
solutions that enable people to connect with their peers and openly share information. Prior
to joining Constellation, Alan spent three years as Director of Marketing at Socialtext and,
before that, 14 years in a variety of roles at IBM/Lotus.
At Socialtext, Alan was responsible for the marketing of enterprise software. He worked
with prospects and customers to help them understand how social software can be used to
improve core business processes. Alan was also the community manager for Socialtext's
customer and business partner communities.
At IBM, Alan held several roles ranging from product management for the Lotus brand to
supporting the IBM Business Partner ecosystem. Alan's final years at IBM were spent on
IBM Software Group's future-thinking strategy team, responsible for bridging IBM research
projects with product development.
Alan graduated from the University of Toronto with a B.A.Sc. in Engineering. His major was
Mechanical Engineering with a minor in Business and Entrepreneurship.
Twitter: @alanlepo
Blog: http://www.alanlepofsky.net
LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/alanlepo
© 2015 Constellation Research, Inc. All rights reserved.
16
About Constellation Research
Constellation Research is an award-winning, Silicon Valley-based research and advisory firm
that helps organizations navigate the challenges of digital disruption through business
models transformation and the judicious application of disruptive technologies. This
renowned group of experienced analysts, led by R “Ray” Wang, focuses on business-themed
research, including Digital Marketing Transformation; Future of Work; Next-Generation
Customer Experience; Data to Decisions; Matrix Commerce; Safety and Privacy; Technology
Optimization and Innovation; and Consumerization of IT and the New C-Suite.
Unlike the legacy analyst firms, Constellation Research is disrupting how research is
accessed, what topics are covered and how clients can partner with a research firm to
achieve success. Over 350 clients have joined from an ecosystem of buyers, partners,
solution providers, C-suite, boards of directors and vendor clients. Our mission is to identify,
validate and share insights with our clients. Most of our clients share a common trait - the
passion for learning, innovating and delivering impactful results.
Organizational Highlights
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Founded and headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2010.
Named Institute of Industry Analyst Relations (IIAR) New Analyst Firm of the Year
in 2011 and Number One Independent Analyst Firm for 2014.
Serving over 350 buy-side and sell-side clients around the globe.
Experienced research team with an average of 25 years of practitioner,
management and industry experience.
Creators of the Constellation Supernova Awards – the industry’s first and largest
recognition of innovators, pioneers and teams who apply emerging and disruptive
technology to drive business value.
Organizers of the Constellation Connected Enterprise – an innovation summit and
best practices knowledge-sharing retreat for business leaders.
Founders of Constellation Executive Network, a membership organization for
digital leaders seeking to learn from market leaders and fast followers.
Website: www.ConstellationR.com
Contact: [email protected]
Twitter: @ConstellationRG
Sales: [email protected]
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