Enterprise Social Software Revenue To Surpass USD 769 Mn: Gartner

Worldwide enterprise social software revenue is on pace to total $664.4 million in 2010, a 14.9 percent increase from 2009 revenue of $578.2 million, according to Gartner, Inc. The market is poised for continued growth in 2011 when revenue is forecast to reach $769.2 million, up 15.7 percent from 2010.

“The social software market is evolving in response to the demand for flexible environments in which participants can connect, create, share, and find people and information relevant to their work,” said Tom Eid, Research Vice President, Gartner. “Social software improves the connectedness of workers, promotes collaboration and helps capture informal knowledge. Social software excels in business contexts that leave room for individuals to interact informally, brainstorm, explore ideas, and encourage or challenge peers. Specific business value can be derived through customer intimacy, product/service excellence, operational effectiveness and creating innovation.”

Aligned to the technology maturation of the enterprise social software market is the relative business maturity and business benefits that organisations are now deriving. Features such as blogs, bookmarks, discussion forums, presence, profiles, rating engines, tagging and wikis are now being combined into applications designed for specific business outcomes, including product reviews and testing, brand marketing, community development and other purposes.

“Success is to be found in managing the information and relationships in support of business initiatives and not the simple deployment of technology,” said Eid. “One of the major goals is to capitalise on community involvement to drive higher leverage and productivity.”