Forrester Research has just released two reports concerning ‘web 2.0’ in the
enterprise. Forrester recently surveyed
119 CIOs on the topic and their answers illustrate what IT honchos want Äì and
don’t want Äì from social software technologies such as blogs, wikis, podcasts,
RSS, social networking, and content tagging.
According to the report entitled CIOs Want Suites For Web 2.0, the
enterprise Web 2.0 market “is beginning to consolidate”. Apparently
CIOs have a strong desire to purchase web 2.0 products “as a suite, as well
as an equally strong desire to purchase these technologies from large, incumbent
software vendors.” 61% of respondents indicated that they would prefer both
a suite solution and a large, incumbent vendor. According to the report,
“integration issues, longevity concerns, and the occasional lack of
polish” are counting against small vendors.
Source: Forrester
This is a worrying thing, to my mind, as there is so much innovation
happening with enterprise web apps by startups. At least the likes of Zoho and
ThinkFree are suites, but what about all the focused startups doing ‘best of
breed’ apps? But it demonstrates once again the
value of partnerships amongst web 2.0 companies, or just being outright
acquired by a bigco (as e.g. JotSpot was by Google last year). Forrester
actually notes the latter trend, saying that consolidation in the Web 2.0 market
has been happening over the past 18 months – e.g. Google acquired Writely and
JotSpot; Cisco acquired Five Across and Tribe.net; Yahoo! acquired del.icio.us;
and Six Apart acquired Rojo Networks.
Forrester recommends that small players “partner to create a tightly
integrated ecosystem to go head-to-head with the suites”. Recent examples
of this, noted by Forrester: SuiteTwo, WordPress and KnowNow have a joint
offering, and Attensa is coupling
with The Real Time Matrix. Indeed Read/WriteWeb has been covering this trend –
see our reports on recent partnerships by Zoho
and Omnidrive, and Central
Desktop and EditGrid.
Forrester also recommends that bigcos, like Microsoft and Google, “go on
a shopping spree for best-of-breed technologies.” Again, this is a trend
that Read/WriteWeb has been covering over the past year or so. Google has been
the most active in this regard, snapping up Writely and JotSpot – two leading
Web Office apps at the time they were acquired.
Another Forrester report, entitled ‘Efficiency Gains And Competitive
Pressures Drive Enterprise Web 2.0 Adoption’, concludes that firms using Web 2.0
technologies “are driven by gains in worker efficiency and a fear of
competitive pressures.” Meanwhile non-adopters cite “a perceived lack
of business value” in web 2.0 apps. It was also noted that wikis and RSS are the two Web 2.0 technologies most likely to be adopted, while enterprises are largely not interested in social networking and blogs – at least, they were the technologies most likely to be viewed as unnecessary.
