Mediaboss Marketing

The enterprise social networking market is starting to mature and is moving from the introduction phase into the growth phase, so it's not the time to be left behind.

That's one finding in a new report from Ovum, which says businesses need to consider social networking's role within wider enterprise collaboration strategy.

Ovums current assessment of the enterprise social networking market indicates that Jive and Yammer are the two vendors that organizations are most eager to compare and contrast, but other vendors are generating significant business and revenues from their offerings," said Richard Edwards, Ovum analyst and author of the report. Industry figures suggest IBM Connections brought in US$105.4m during 2011, and from this we believe the current value of the enterprise social networking market to be in excess of US$500m, Edwards says.

Ovum says enterprise social networking is in the adopter phase, with approximately 10 percent of organizations in established IT markets deploying solutions or subscribing to services. Mobile devices are increasingly being used to access the networks and this is extending the use-case for such solutions to a broad audience.

As the business case for investment in enterprise social networking solutions has yet to be proven to business skeptics," Edwards noted, "some vendors are encouraging independent user adoption in the hope it will prove business value. Ovum believes that the business potential offered by enterprise social networking will only be unlocked when necessity dictates a business change."

Meanwhile, the enterprise collaborations technology landscape is awash with social software from a variety of different sources. Vendors offering pure-play enterprise social networking solutions are competing against established enterprise collaboration providers. On the other hand, vendors offering business automation social platforms are trying to gain traction in a market that is also assessing the merits of emerging offerings from companies specializing in enterprise applications.

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Enterprise Social Networking Market Tops $500 Million