I was recently read the summary of the Forrester Wave Report: The Leaders in Community Platforms for Marketer, as depicted in the graphic here. There are numerous other reviews of this report, including the one by MediaPost's OnlineSpin.

What I find most striking to me about the Forrester report is what they left out, rather than what they included. This report ranked "community platform vendors", not community platforms. The difference is profound and central to most social media strategies.

While the community platform vendors that Forrester ranked offer valuable consulting services wrapped around their software, the fact remains that their software is proprietary. This means a small number of people coding and testing the product.

In contrast, open platforms like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc. have literally thousands of developers and testers. This means innovation and maturity that is exponentially more powerful, so long as the organization guiding the platform understands how to harness that horsepower.

Forrester as much as acknowledged this omission in their closing paragraph:

the exploding WordPress blog platform has demonstrated how open standards can become a huge platform advantage because they rally stakeholders, especially passionate developers, to iterate and innovate at a rapid clip. I hope and anticipate the same will happen in the community platform space.

This has been happening for some time in the Drupal community/ecosystem as well, and I'm surprised Forrest didn't recognize that.

The big disadvantage that Drupal has today, is there is no software/consulting company, based on the Drupal platform, with enough scale and brand name recognition to be included in evaluations like this. That will change. And when it does, it will force a necessary de-coupling of people/process from technology. The vendor chosen to help with people/process will not own the technology--just like Red Hat does not own Linux.