We’re thrilled to announce that Axero was selected by Gartner for their Market Guide for Intranet Packaged Solutions. In a crowded market with hundreds of vendors, Axero stands out as one of the top 20 intranet software platforms in the world! While we’re certainly proud of this accomplishment, more than anything, we believe it gives our clients peace of mind knowing that they put their trust in the right vendor.
If you are evaluating intranet platforms, Gartner’s guide gives you the upper hand and saves you hours of researching which vendors to schedule demos with. In this guide, Gene Phifer, Vice President, Distinguished Analyst in Gartner Research and Advisory, outlines his key findings after reviewing and analyzing the 20 selected intranet vendors.
Read more to learn about Gartner’s Market Guide for Intranet Packaged Solutions, or get your complimentary copy here: Gartner’s Market Guide for Intranet Packaged Solutions
Table of Contents
Are There Really That Many Differences Between Intranet Solutions?
Maybe you’re thinking to yourself, should we talk with each of those vendors? But that’s not what I’m recommending. Here’s what I suggest. After you finish reading the rest of this blog post, download the report and take 15-20 minutes to read it.
It’s going to give you:
- a high-level view of the current intranet space,
- what kind of features and services are covered by packaged solutions, and
- how vendors stack up against each other.
The Importance of Intranet Packaged Solutions
You’re going to learn that most active intranets— maybe even yours—are outdated and stale. People don’t use them, and everyone is frustrated because their intranet doesn’t do what they need it to do. And, with all of the scrambling to support remote work this past year, and most companies falling short, these other intranet vendors are now looking to put something in place to fix these problems. That’s probably why you’re reading this.
“[Buyers] are outraged by their traditional intranets because they are stale, outdated and irrelevant, and are impediments to business versus tools of business.”
—Gartner
Today’s organizations are dissatisfied with traditional intranets which provide neither a positive employee experience nor the agility and flexibility that enterprises require for digital transformation. And so companies are looking for new, modern intranet solutions that are out-of-the-box, or packaged solutions.
The key there—on the surface.
In the report, Gartner highlights five typical use cases for Axero. Let’s take a deeper look at each use case.
Enterprise Social Intranet
Millions of employees and hundreds of clients are already using Axero’s intranet software, including enterprise companies like Ikea, Toyota, and Dannon. A social intranet provides a communications and collaboration hub for your company. With the demands of digital transformation accelerated by COVID-19, today more than ever, companies are looking for solutions that can nurture and support company culture among a remote workforce.
A platform for your people helps your digital workspace feel like the workplace. Real-time activity streams and notifications spread the word and make sure everyone stays connected.
Enterprise solutions require in-depth and powerful integrations as well as the ability to fact-check and maintain records of prior communication—especially expired content like outdated policies or guidelines. In many ways, the rest of the use cases that follow all contribute to the big picture of the enterprise social intranet that Axero offers.
Internal Employee Communications
We believe that communication drives culture. Without solid communication, how can everyone be on the same page? Internal employee communications can facilitate greater transparency, which in turn creates trust in leadership and helps create purpose and belonging.
Part of internal employee communication involves publishing content, and regardless of your content’s format, Axero offers several options to choose from. Whether you’re looking to code, or you want to drag-and-drop, the interface is simple and clear.
Internal employee communication sometimes needs to be filtered for different groups or projects, too, and that’s easy to accomplish with Axero. Targeting specific groups, marking items as required reading, and then analyzing the statistics help you see your employees’ reactions and responses to the announcements. It’s easy to measure the impact at a glance.
Knowledge Management
Communication and content are great, but if they’re not accessible, searchable, and organized, are they really useful at all? Having a centralized hub for all documentation and communication has to be matched with robust accessibility or it becomes a content graveyard.
With Axero, you can create collaborative governance, where different members of your team own responsibility and management for different documents. Targeted permissions ensure that only the right eyes have access, and drag-and-drop to upload makes information sharing easy.
Providing employees with quick access to your company’s content empowers them to make better decisions, too. Axero enables this with robust search. Every document and file is fully indexed and retrievable, and extensive filtering lets you hone in even more by Spaces, tags, content type, and location. With Axero, you’ll never again spend hours looking for last February’s report.
Employee Collaboration and Remote Work
Some of the best ideas come from collaboration. The challenge with remote work though, is how to facilitate the opportunities to collaborate that might’ve been present in a physical workplace.
With Axero, you can have dedicated Spaces for teams, projects or any specific purpose. For example, you can create a Boardroom, a Town Hall or an Onboarding Center. Your options are only limited by your imagination.
In addition to Spaces, Axero’s software offers chat and instant messaging, commenting, and many more communication options. This means your employees can communicate asynchronously, in real-time, one-on-one, or as a group. Everyone has a voice, and everyone is connected. Your teams can easily build relationships and trust, no matter where they’re located.
Employee Experience, Engagement and Culture
Workplace culture is critical to business success—now more than ever. By connecting your employees and leaders in one digital space, you can strengthen relationships and ensure mission and vision alignment across the company.
Axero AdaptEngine technology lets you customize your intranet with the look and feel of your branding—without heavy coding.
People are the heart of culture, and so our directory isn’t like every other directory. Instead, if you choose, your employees can upload a photo, list their accomplishments, share personal facts, and more. Rich profiles make the workplace more human, and the responsive org chart offers clarity and ease to how everyone’s connected.
Gamification with Challenge Badges and Kudos Badges encourage employee recognition and engagement, too. You assign the values to various activities and watch as your employees stack up points and badges. Not only does this help build workplace culture and increase happiness—it also boosts employee retention.
So, there you have it—the five use cases Gartner calls out for Axero. But you’ll discover many, many more when you decide to give it a try. Many intranet solutions offer similar features to the ones Gartner mentions in this report, but we believe that there are several other things that set us apart from our competitors.
Here’s How Axero Is Different
Our Product
Axero Intranet gives you all the features you’re going to need in an intranet. It’s easy to use, fast to learn, and has all the bells and whistles you’d expect. Our platform also covers all the typical use cases and more, including integrations with other systems that you use—like Zoom, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace.
But with our AdaptEngine technology, you have the flexibility and speed to customize your intranet like you’re in IT. You can easily change and update things on the fly, with quick and easy drag-and-drop features. It also allows you to store and find anything you need in the matter of seconds. You have the agility to move how you want to, match your intranet to your company culture easily, and make high level changes with ease.
Implementation
Our clients tell us that our onboarding, implementation and design services are the best they’ve ever experienced. Not just with an intranet, but with any software they’ve ever implemented.
Let that sink in. Any software. Now, we know that every software company claims to have the best implementation services, so don’t take our word for it. Read the actual testimonials from our clients.
But, here’s the real secret to our excellent implementation services: if we don’t get you implemented successfully, in a short amount of time, and up to your expectations, we fail.
We fail ourselves. We fail you. And, we fail to win in the marketplace.
As a rapidly growing company, we cannot afford failures. You get the backing of our entire team of intranet experts, like they are part of your team, throughout implementation. We create a customized plan that accomplishes all of your goals. In fact, we’re prepared to get your intranet launched 94% faster than other platforms.
Our relationship doesn’t end there. We continue to work by your side during the lifetime of our partnership to ensure your happiness and success. We’ll cover more about that in the Client Support section below.
Client support
Similar to implementation, we recognize that most organizations claim the best client support. However, just like our implementation services, if we don’t support you, if you aren’t successful, if you’re not happy, and if you don’t get what you need, we fail.
If we fail, our employees quit, our clients leave, and we go out of business tomorrow. That seems like a pretty bleak future. And not one I want to get behind. Plus, it completely ignores our biggest goal and our core values. That’s why we promise the fastest response time in the market.
Whenever you have a question, we guarantee that we will respond within one hour, at any time of the day, any day of the week. You also get ongoing help developing adoption, engagement, and customizing your intranet. You always have 24/7 access to our product documentation and support forums, where you can interact with our passionate community of employees, clients, and partners.
Mobile apps
A year ago, our mobile apps were good. But they weren’t customizable and they only offered a sliver of the desktop version’s functionality. Today that is a very different story.
More than ever, employees are using their mobile devices to access their work intranets, and so we’ve invested heavily in our mobile apps. We made sure that they’re customizable with the same drag-and-drop tools our clients love in the desktop version.
We also expanded the functionality to make sure that all the features you need to stay connected are included in your mobile intranet—sharing documents and files, having conversations, keeping your employees informed—you name it!
You might notice while you’re evaluating vendors that a lot of the apps are “wrapper apps.” That means they simply load the desktop version into a shell app. It’s not the same experience at all as a native mobile app.
Think of all the consumer apps that you use: Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Yelp, etc.
When you tap around in those apps, there’s a fluid experience—pages slide in from the left, from the bottom up, and so on. The experience is smoother. Wrapper apps basically load webpages, so you have to wait while the page loads. Our app is not a wrapper app.
Thank You, Gartner, for This Honor
Again, we are honored to be chosen as one of the 20 vendors that Gartner highlighted in their Market Guide for Intranet Packaged Solutions. Gartner’s reputation as an industry-standard is beyond all others.
Over the years I’ve spoken with dozens of Gartner analysts, and after years of talking with them, I’ve learned that they truly know what they’re talking about. They spend vast amounts of time researching the market, talking with vendors, weighing responses, and analyzing intranet platforms and services. As the world’s leading research and advisory company, Gartner equips business leaders with indispensable advice, insights, and tools to achieve breakthrough business results.
Are you ready to read the report and get a start on your intranet vendor research? We have a complimentary copy for you. Download it today!
