Enterprise social networking had a break-out year in 2007 with much
faster than expected growth as leading adopters started to reveal their
early successes and a number of robust enterprise solutions emerged.
While the market is still serviced by a wide variety of small players
there was significant consolidation through mergers, acquisitions, and
new products from existing players.
“Enterprise social networking applications
established a strong foothold in 2007, emerging as a more comprehensive
solution than single utility applications like blogs and Wikis,”
stated Rachel Happe, research manager, Digital Business Economy. “A
number of important societal, digital marketplace-specific, and
enterprise trends are driving aggressive growth in this market. They
include social filtering of content, media channel fragmentation,
adoption of consumer social networking services, and the perception in
mature markets like enterprise software that communities are a way to
increase differentiation and retain customers.”
Additional observations of the social networking applications market
include:
The surfacing of new competitors in the form of established
information access and content management vendors that build social
features into their solutions.
As an emergent market, the growth rate is high and spread unevenly
between a variety of small vendors and a few larger vendors who
represent a relatively large percentage of the market today. While
2007 saw some consolidation, IDC expects that 2008 will see even more.
There is considerable functional adoption as companies deployed social
networking solutions to address a wide variety of specific business
challenges spanning HR, marketing/sales, engineering, channel
management, and customer service functions.
The emergence of social intelligence solutions that combine elements
of web analytics, brand monitoring, and information access in order to
provide management dashboards of social networks both internal and
external to corporate firewalls.
Social networking market growth will be moderated by cultural and
resource limitations. Many companies will deploy social networking
applications and see few benefits because of the lack of understanding
or comfort with the openness required for social networking to be
successful.
The higher than expected market adoption in 2007 has pushed long-term
projections higher as well. While this forecast projects both slow and
aggressive growth scenarios, the projected size of the market in 2012 is
expected to be $1.3 billion.
The study, U.S. Social Networking Application Forecast 2008-2012:
Enterprise Social Networking Takes Hold (IDC #211945)
presents a market sizing and forecast in terms of total aggregated
market revenue, which includes software license and subscription fees,
hosting and delivery fees, and technical implementation service fees.
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