Companies in Thrall of Social Networks (Java Training Courses - blogs.wsj.com)

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Oracle Tuesday jumped on the bandwagon of what’s being called enterprise social media, acquiring social media monitoring firm Collective Intelligence. That followed  two other acquisitions in the enterprise social media space announced Monday — Salesforce.com’s deal for Facebook ad targeting firm Buddy Media, and Google’s acquisition of Meebo, a social media ad and content-sharing platform.

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Of course, CIOs have plenty more to choose from: there’s Jive Software, a start-up in the enterprise social networking space that went public late last year; Microsoft has SharePoint, and IBM offers Lotus Connections for social-based collaboration.

Actual success stories are harder to come by, and when they do, often take place almost organically, without a big technology push. But they often occur thanks to a shared service deployment led or supported by technology executives.

AstraZeneca CTO Angela Yochem told CIO Journal that social collaboration tools are “very necessary” to broadenthe base of stakeholders who come together for both scheduled and ad hoc meetings, including people outside the organization. But she says no single, tool in existence supports collaboration among all the entities that the company wants to include in the network.

Yochem says that finding the optimal combination of tools, which include applications from start-ups as well as mainstream vendors, is what allows AstraZeneca to operate successfully throughout the extended community. The organization also uses an industry model known as FIPNet (for Fully Integrated Pharmaceutical Network), which connects major stakeholders in drug development processes, and which has strong social network underpinnings, Yochem says.