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In our follow up to ‘Market Research suggests Enterprise 2.0 confusion’ we explore analyst predictions for the future of the Enterprise 2.0 market. Early this year Forrester released a report predicting that the ‘Enterprise Web 2.0’ market would be worth $4.6 billion by 2013. In October 2007 Radicati predicted that the global ‘Business Social Software’ market would reach $3.3 billion by 2011. In July 2007 Gartner had predicted a very different figure: $707 million revenue for ‘Enterprise Social Software’ by 2011. Are these apples-for-apples comparisons? Who should we believe?
ReadWriteWeb covered Forrester’s report in detail, including the challenges ahead for the emerging Enterprise 2.0 market. InformationWeek also provided coverage along with additional quotes from the report’s author. CMSWire put together a useful summary of the key points. 
Others were quick to point out the flaws in Forrester’s analysis. Niall Cooke exposed that based on the report’s own findings the actual figure for Enterprise 2.0 spending is closer to $1.8 billion - the $4.6 billion value from Forrester includes external web-facing implementations as well as internal Enterprise 2.0 deployments. Dennis Howlett of ZDNet raised further concerns based on Forrester’s definition and scope.
We have reported recently how the lack of a single reference term among analysts continues to create confusion, this may be a contributory factor to the differences in predicted figures from the leading analysts. Forrester’s report goes on to predict “subsumption into other enterprise collaboration software over the next five years” and that Enterprise 2.0 “will eventually disappear into the fabric of the enterprise”.
Will the current economic slowdown be a threat to Enterprise 2.0 market growth? Not according to McKinsey, in March 2007 they said that “More than three-fourths of executives who responded to a McKinsey survey say they plan to maintain or increase their investments in technology trends that encourage user collaboration, such as peer-to-peer networking, social networks, and Web services”. In more recent survey results McKinsey said this month that “all companies [who responded to the survey] plan to spend more on Web 2.0 tools”. Gartner also released a report this month forecasting that I.T. spending will remain strong in 2008, with an increase of 9.5 percent from 2007. We often hear that Enterprise 2.0 will become a feature, not a product. This may evolve as existing enterprise vendors begin to include social networking, blogs and wikis within their flagship enterprise solutions. Dion Hinchliffe writes about IBM, Microsoft, SAP and Oracle activity in this space. We also reported last month how large enterprise vendors are beginning to enter the Enterprise 2.0 space. Large enterprise vendors will continue to develop Enterprise 2.0 solutions to cross-sell to existing accounts and leading ‘pure-play’ Enterprise 2.0 vendors will continue to grow their customer base. Spending in existing markets such as Knowledge Management, Intranets and Collaboration will also begin to overlap with Enterprise 2.0. However the future of enterprise software is changing with open-source playing a significant role in many Enterprise 2.0 implementations. Another trend is emerging too, some companies are turning their backs on enterprise software altogether - Bill Ives reports how Serena Software moved their corporate intranet to Facebook for all 800 employees. Does your company have an Enterprise 2.0 budget? Have your say in our comments. Related articles on E20portal.com:
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