by Stephen Ankenman

With 40,000 cloud signups and 5000 installed intranets, Bitrix24 users form a sample group worth studying. Here are the main trends that we have observed:

1. Social intranet is small, real small, and that’s good news.

The median Bitrix24 intranet size is only 9.7 users. Small businesses are embracing social intranet when it’s offered as affordable cloud solution that doesn’t require install or maintenance.

2. Social intranet isn’t just for business.

While 62% of social intranet users are companies, 10% are educational institutions, another 10% are healthcare providers, 9% are religious institutions (churches), 7% are non-profits, and 2% are non-traditional users that can’t be easily classified (musical groups, bridge clubs, and so on).

3. Social intranet is a BYOD (bring your own device) affair.

As of Jan 2013, 18% of Bitrix24 users access corporate portals from smartphones and tablets, not PCs. We expect the trend to continue.

4. The box is dying, but…

While 70% of our clients prefer using cloud-based services, 30% need the box version for integration and/or compliance reasons. Several countries, like Germany, have restrictive privacy and personal data use legislation, forcing companies to store data on their own or approved servers.

5. Emerging markets are on fire.

The top 10 social intranet users by country are as follows: US, Russia, India, Brazil, UK, Philippines, Germany, China, Indonesia, Canada.

6. Skepticism about the social intranet concept isn’t over yet.

While 87% like social intranet idea and believe it will increase employee productivity, the other 13% prefer a classic intranet concept and think that social features will either be misused or won’t add anything of value.

7. The most popular activities inside social intranets are as follows:

73% – activity stream, instant messaging, and comments

27% – document storage, sharing or collaboration

21% – tasks and project management

15% – scheduling, calendars and meetings

14% – CRM

10% – work reports

4% – business processes

8. Social intranet is changing traditional work patterns.

For example, 60% of Bitrix24 users access the corporate portal on weekends at least once and 12% of Bitrix24 users accessed their portal on Christmas Day.

9. Social intranet is addictive.

13% of social intranet users use the extranet to work with clients, freelancers or service-providers, exposing it to a wider audience.

10. CRM, Project Management and Collaboration software is being absorbed by wider social intranet solutions.

About 8% of Bitrix24 users have switched form a single-point CRM or Project Management software to the all-in-one productivity and communications solution of Bitrix24.

This post by Stephen Ankenman originally appeared on the Bitrix24 Blog.

Bitrix24 is an initiative of Bitrix, Inc., a privately-owned company owned and managed by its founders. The Bitrix24 service is the final evolutionary stage of Bitrix Intranet and Extranet solutions (Bitrix Inc. products) and was launched as a beta cloud-based service in April, 2012. Bitrix takes pride in serving customers ranging from Fortune 500 companies to small organizations, including well-known enterprises like Xerox, Samsung, Volkswagen, KIA, Gazprom, Vogue and PC Magazine.

Photo Credits

Bitrix24