Startups in the social collaboration software market are facing the combination of a maturing market ripe for consolidation and a bear market, where larger enterprise vendors may look to bargain-shop and cherry-pick the best-of-breed providers.

Gartner analyst Matt Cain said in a new report that providers of blog, RSS, wiki and other newfangled collaboration technologies may have it tougher than others because of where they are in their maturation cycles.

There are literally hundreds of vendors in this space, from giants like IBM to smaller startups such as Jive Software, NewsGator, Socialtext, MindTouch, Yammer and Awareness. Cain predicted that more than 60 percent of the current social software vendors will exit the market through acquisition or failure by 2012.

While spending on social software suites to build communities is becoming the modus operandi for enterprises, Cain said he expects 2009 through 2011 to be marked by technology and vendor consolidation. 

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