BOSTON / LONDON —  An emerging architecture places social networking and collaboration services as an enterprise service rather than a dedicated location, though early adopters face significant hurdles, according to an updated evaluation report released today by independent analyst firm, The Real Story Group (formerly CMS Watch).

RSG’s Enterprise Collaboration & Social Software research critically evaluates 22 major vendors, including five that focus on "socializing" existing systems. These are:

• NewsGator: Social Sites
• Salesforce: Chatter
• TIBCO Software: tibbr
• VMware: Socialcast
• Yammer: Yammer

“This emerging architecture posits that employees want to interact and collaborate within the flow of their everyday work, regardless of the applications they use,” notes RSG Analyst Kashyap Kompella. “The idea is less social-as-a-destination and more social-as-a-service across your digital workplace.”

At the same time, RSG found vendors and customers alike struggling to fulfill this new approach. Four key challenges include:

• Lack of ubiquity. Chatter and Social Sites remain bound primarily to a single enterprise platform (Salesforce and SharePoint, respectively)
• Integration complexity and expense. TIBCO's tibbr offers the potential for rich integration with legacy systems, but with significantly higher cost and complexity
• Contextual discordance. Socialcast and Chatter offer lighter-weight alternatives, but frequently struggle to fold neatly into existing work processes
• Mobile disconnect. All the social layer vendors distribute their own mobile clients rather than integrating with existing mobile apps from legacy vendors

"As an emerging architecture, enterprises face divergent choices about how and how much they implement," notes RSG Founder, Tony Byrne. "With a dearth of integration standards, vendors are tending to come up with one-off approaches, so customers will want to test very carefully before committing one way or another.”