Forrester Predicts a Large Growth in Social Networking Market but How Will Its Integration Occur with the Enterprise?

Forrester recently released their projections for the Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Market Forecast: 2007 To 2013. The report was produced by Oliver Young and some of his colleagues. They said in the summary that, “Enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies will grow strongly over the next five years, reaching $4.6 billion globally by 2013, with social networking, mashups, and RSS capturing the greatest share. In all, the market for enterprise Web 2.0 tools will be defined by commoditization, eroding prices, and subsumption into other enterprise collaboration software over the next five years; it will eventually disappear into the fabric of the enterprise, despite the major impacts the technology will have on how businesses market their products and optimize their workforces.”

Our new Release 2.2 provides the application integration capability through our web services Application Programming Interface (API) that enables you to add the full functionality of Connectbeam social software into existing IT applications. This capability will allow the social context of information and people to become fully integrated into the fabric of the enterprise. While this can occur on a transparent basis, I would not use the word disappear to describe this integration. To be fair I do not think that Forrester really means that Enterprise Web 2.0 will go away but that social context applications will simply be part of most, if not all, enterprise applications and a standard way of doing business.

We are taking this enterprise-wide social context integration a step further with our Release 2.2. Most enterprise 2.0 tools and most social tools (e.g. wikis, blogs, etc.) are adding their own social networking and tagging features. However, the real value of social networking and tagging is only realized if they are detached from any single application. For example, while I am working inside many wikis, I can network with others who are also inside the same wiki. That unfortunately does not lend claim to 'true' social networking across the enterprise. Instead, it has the potential to create more silos.

Our APIs are bi-directional so we can draw tagging and networking information from multiple sources, breaking down the silos and setting the table for true enterprise wide integration of the social context of information. In upcoming posts I will further explore how Connectbeam can help break through these silos of information. It is this capability that can truly make social networking and tagging part of the fabric of the enterprise

We were interviewed as part of the research for the Forrester report and you can order it through the Forrester web site. ReadWriteWeb also offers a useful summary and I draw these summary comments from their post, Enterprise 2.0 to Become a $4.6 Billion Industry by 2013. First, Forrester excluded consumer services like Blogger, Facebook, Netvibes, and Twitter from their predictions. They felt that these services are aimed at consumers, often supported by ads, and do not qualify as Enterprise 2.0 tools. I agree with their assessment. There are possible roles for these tools within some enterprises as I wrote in The Role of Facebook in the Enterprise: A Post Script but they are not the tools for enterprise business applications.

One of the most interesting findings to us at Connectbeam was their projection that most of the revenue growth will occur in social networking tools. Enterprise 2.0 is often defined as social software so this should make sense. They rank social networking ahead of blogs, wikis, podcasts, and widgets on the growth curve. Mashups come in second. Now here is where it gets tricky as many social applications are using a form of mashups to integrate with other enterprise applications as Connectbeam is doing through its Application Programming Interface mentioned above. I do agree that social networking is the big new thing and would just add that mashups are the highway for social software integration with enterprise applications.

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