IDC highlights enormous enterprise social net growth

International Data Corporation (IDC) has found that enterprise social software adoption is accelerating at a significant pace.

Its study, Worldwide Enterprise Social Software 2011 Vendor Shares, found that there were uses in almost all industry verticals that it looked at. The technology continues, IDC claims, to be a critical tool in decision-making and worker productivity.

There are plenty of companies who are now interested in building and implementing their own overall social business strategy. This means that there is plenty of opportunity for vendors to cook up the most professional, enterprise grade systems that are expected at that level of business, with the right tools becoming critical components of their strategies.

Almost all vendors in the enterprise social software market enjoyed double digit growth over 2010-2011. The two at the top were IBM and Jive, who swang more than 70 percent year on year growth, which, IDC says, is just under double the market average. Speeding way ahead of that in the top 20 was Yammer, which Microsoft has just bought into, earning itself 132.3 percent growth.

IDC’s group veep for software business solutions, Michael Fauscette, said that companies are increasingly picking up social software as they search for ways they can boost collaboration. Businesses hope to boost individual worker productivity and manage content and information, where enterprise social software can come in.

“Compartmentalised and specific collaboration is still required by many organisations,” Fauscette said. “Traditional collaborative applications providing closed loop and B2B communications will retain their existence in organisations alongside more open social solutions”.

Workers, Fauscette said, will inevitably be the ones to choose the most appropriate combination of tools for managing and performing daily tasks.

“It will be imperative for vendors to recognise that ad hoc collaboration will continue to complement social activity streams,” Fauscette said, “particularly as enterprise social software becomes more embedded in business processes and the workspace”.