Enterprise Social Software Revenue To Grow To $4.5 Bn By 2016

New research from International Data Corporation (IDC) shows that enterprise social software adoption will accelerate rapidly with continued strong growth through 2016. IDC expects worldwide enterprise social software applications revenue to grow from $0.8 billion in 2011 to $4.5 billion in 2016, representing an impressive compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 42.4 percent.

“It is critical for social software solutions to keep up with the pace of change to meet emerging business needs,” said Michael Fauscette, Group Vice President, IDC’s Software Business Solutions Group. “IDC expects acquisition activity to continue apace and that social solutions will rapidly evolve and converge around business critical workflow. Vendors should change with these trends, and users should act in anticipation of them.”

As new features are being defined and incorporated to meet emerging business needs, IDC expects social software to encroach and possibly replace other collaborative applications throughout the forecast period. From a regional perspective, growth in enterprise social software in the Americas will be aggressive, with all regions expected to grow fairly well. The Americas represent a disproportionately high share of revenue early in the forecast period, as the EMEA and APJ regions can expect a longer timeframe for change.

“Companies will increasingly want to integrate and even embed social software into all enterprise applications, so it is essential for vendors to provide open APIs and capabilities to put social software into the enterprise workflow,” added Fauscette.

The IDC study, Worldwide Enterprise Social Software 2012-2016 Forecast provides a sizing of the enterprise social software market in 2011 and the 2012–2016 market forecast. Historical and forecast revenue data is shown for the total worldwide market and by geographic region.