Forrester’s Oliver Young and a cast of five others recently came out with their projections for the Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Market Forecast: 2007 To 2013. In the summary they said that, “Enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies will grow strongly over the next five years, reaching $4.6 billion globally by 2013, with social networking, mashups, and RSS capturing the greatest share. In all, the market for enterprise Web 2.0 tools will be defined by commoditization, eroding prices, and subsumption into other enterprise collaboration software over the next five years; it will eventually disappear into the fabric of the enterprise, despite the major impacts the technology will have on how businesses market their products and optimize their workforces.”

I like the big numbers and major impact. I might prefer to say enterprise 2.0 will get integrated with the fabric of the enterprise (rather than disappear) as more enterprise 2.0 providers are providing open APIs and ways to integrate their social wares into the enterprise applications. I have seen this with BroadSoft, Connectbeam, InsideView, Nexaweb, Serena, SynerG, and others that I have interviewed for this blog and the AppGap. Mashups or some form of composite applications through data integration appears to be the pathway here.

I have not seen the full report and I am sure it will provide many interesting details. ReadWriteWeb offered a useful summary. In defining their subject the report did not include consumer services like Blogger, Facebook, Netvibes, and Twitter. They felt that these types of services are aimed at consumers and are often supported by ads, so they do not qualify as Enterprise 2.0 tools. I agree with their assessment. There are possible roles for these tools within some enterprises but they are the foundation for enterprise business processes except for some rare exceptions. Instead they included many of the vendors we have been discussing on this blog and the AppGap.

The report found that the larger the firm, the more likely that they will invest in enterprise 2.0 tools. I guess they have the budgets but they are often the most security concerned so perhaps some of these concerns are dropping away. The least likely are the very small companies, 6 to 99 employees. Perhaps they can still yell across the hallway but these companies often do not have any collaboration infrastructure to replace and should take advantage of the low (and sometimes free) cost tools available on the low end of enterprise 2.0.

One of the most interesting findings was their projection that most of the revenue growth will occur in social networking tools.. Enterprise 2.0 is often defined as social software so this should make sense. They rank social networking ahead of blogs, wikis, podcasts, and widgets on the growth curve. Mashups come in second. Now here is where it gets tricky as many social applications are using mashups to integrate with other enterprise applications as noted above. I also find that many blog and wiki providers are adding other features, including mashups and social networking. Some my prediction is that it will get harder and harder to separate these functions. However, I do agree that social networking is the big new thing and that mashups are the highway for social software integration.