What about Web 2.0 in 2008?

Communications News, March, 2008

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The enterprise Web 2.0 market will continue to gain importance in 2008 as an increasing number of firms look to Web 2.0 tools like blogs, wikis and social networking to solve long-standing information worker problems, according to a recent report from Forrester Research. As a result, Forrester expects to see strong demand for tools like enterprise RSS and social networking, along with an increased role for IT departments in technology acquisition.

"Web 2.0 stepped into the collaboration and productivity market with a bang in 2007," says Forrester researcher G. Oliver Young. "Enterprise Web 2.0 is now delivering substantial business value around collaboration and productivity and has reached the 2008 priority list for many enterprises."

This year, Forrester predicts:

IT departments will embrace Web 2.0 technologies. To date, most IT departments have resisted Web 2.0 tools, often viewing them as consumer grade, of secondary concern to other major IT investments or simply frivolous. Forrester expects at least half of the 42 percent of enterprises that say Web 2.0 is not on their priority list to add it by year's end. "CIOs will concede that they cannot quell employees' use of consumer-oriented or SaaS Web 2.0 tools and will mitigate risk by deploying enterprise-class tools in their stead," explains Young. "For IT departments aspiring to be more relevant to the business, enterprise Web 2.0 tools will be a high-impact, low-cost method to show leadership and innovation."

Trial deployments in 2007 will deepen in 2008. Forrester has seen the adoption of enterprise Web 2.0 tools consistently follow a tried-and-true pattern: technology investigation, experimentation, rollout to small groups or teams and finally widespread adoption. The vast majority of deployments followed this pattern in 2007.

RSS demand will grow substantially. In 2007, interest in the RSS "publish and subscribe" architecture grew as firms sought to syndicate internal content such as RFP requests, blog postings, wiki changes and CRM data. Today, an average enterprise RSS deployment runs between $80,000 and $100,000, and unless this price drops closer to the $30,000 to $50,000 range, many potential buyers will be unable to justify the expense.

Mashups will mature and eat into other major markets. "Enterprise mashups will move from a few one-off pilots to true enterprise-class software in the coming 12 months," Young says. "There will be no shortage of volatility on the supply side as mashups begin to take large bites out of the RSS, portal, search and enterprise application integration markets.

Social networking will grab much of the limelight. Forrester is getting inquiries on how firms should approach social networking, both to lock it out and to embrace it for employees. Expect the adoption of social networking solutions for business to accelerate dramatically in 2008 with many firms looking for internal social networking solutions.

"Web 2.0 has radically changed the way people interact with both information and one another on the Internet," Young says. "Now it's coming to an enterprise near you. The value is its ability to more efficiently generate, self-publish and find information, plus share expertise in a way that's easier and cheaper than earlier knowledge-management attempts."