Gartner defines B2B customer community platforms as software that enables organizations to offer and manage a branded online community. These communities permit visitors and members to learn how to use products, connect with peers and advance their skills and careers. Platforms offer self-service and collaboration capabilities such as discussion forums, knowledge base access and user groups. In addition, platforms include gamification features to motivate and reward member engagement. B2B customer community platforms help organizations provide a branded online community for visitors and members who typically work for companies that have purchased or are evaluating products and solutions.
Cloud Computing refers to products and services that enable the delivery, management, and optimization of computing resources over the internet. This category includes markets that focus on empowering organizations to seamlessly store, migrate, manage, and optimize workloads across diverse cloud environments, including public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud models.
Data and Analytics refers to products and services that enable organizations to collect, integrate, analyze, and act on data to drive informed decision-making and business outcomes. This category includes markets that focus on empowering enterprises to manage data pipelines, ensure data quality and governance, extract insights through advanced analytics, and machine learning across structured and unstructured data environments.
Enterprise video content management (EVCM) comprises products intended to manage and facilitate the delivery of one-to-any, on-demand or live video across internet protocols. It may also include associated network services - content delivery networks (CDN) or enterprise content delivery networks (ECDN) - intended to facilitate the delivery of video. EVCM serves workers and customers who need to watch - and workers who need to share - videos.
Social analytics is the process of collecting, measuring, analyzing and interpreting the results of interactions and associations among people, topics and ideas from social media sources. This market examines social analytics solutions covering social filtering, text analytics, sentiment analysis, image analysis and public-facing social media analytics. It focuses on solutions that derive at least 60% of their revenue from software versus solutions that are mainly based on consulting services.
The social customer service market comprises applications that support social media as a component of an overall customer service strategy. Gartner classifies an application provider as a social customer service vendor if it supports customer service in one or two specific types of function: External communities: Often referred to as peer-to-peer communities, this software enables customers and partners to blog, post, rate products/services and construct ideas, as well as support peer interactions and offer incentives for loyalty. Social media engagement: Going beyond just monitoring social media for brand mentions, these applications are capable of responding to constituents on popular social networks and have case management.
Social marketing management (SMM) tools equip organizations with the ability to orchestrate and manage a wide range of social communication efforts across various marketing teams and social platforms within a single tool. These software solutions help marketing leaders monitor, collect and analyze social data; develop, publish and promote content; identify and engage with their audience; and track the performance and impact of these communications.