Starting 2009 Right — Meeting with Gartner

Welcome to 2009!

KickBlog has been on a short holiday hiatus over the last few weeks but we’re back and ready to GO! We’ve got a ton planned for the year that we’re very excited to share here and on KickDeveloper, and as always, I’m sure there’ll be a ton that’s unplanned.

To kick things off, we met with Anthony Bradley, managing vice president, and Nikos Drakos, research director, at Gartner this week. Alex and I had a very interesting (to say the least) conversation with them about the social software industry, our vision and offering, the market and their view of where it is today and where it’s headed. One conversation point that I found interesting was around the way the ‘enterprise’ (loosely defined as B2B—partnerships, customer support, internal, etc.) is beginning to see real value in using social media for customer relationships and marketing. Here’s Anthony’s initial takeaway from our chat.