What does Web 2.0 mean to an enterprise?
(2 votes, average: 4 out of 5)
Loading ...This is the third part in the series on New Product Development. The first part was on The Changing Rules of Product Development and the second part was on Technology and New Product Development.
As consumer internet products and services become ubiquitous and are adopted widely by a mainstream audience, the trickle effect of Web 2.0 into enterprises is avalanching into a wave that is becoming stronger by the day.
Many organizations had earlier been skeptical about the ROI on using Web 2.0 tools across the enterprise. However, with grass-roots adoption by on-the-ground staff to improve productivity, collaboration and knowledge-sharing, and results that are building over time, enterprises are willing to invest more on Web 2.0 technologies.
In fact, a recent report by Forrester Research is predicting that enterprise spending (currently at around $1 billion) on social networking tools, mashups, and RSS is going to increase dramatically to $4.6 billion by the year 2013.
Some of the largest ISVs in the enterprise space have been integrating Web 2.0 technologies into their products for some time now. Microsoft’s SharePoint collaboration features, IBM’s Lotus connections, mashup products and upcoming Quickr and SAP’s Business Suite which includes social networking and widgets are some examples. However, many of them are limited in their cross-boundary integration abilities.
On the other hand, stand-alone commercial Web 2.0 software companies that cater to Enterprise 2.0 users like Communispace, Newsgator Technologies, Six Apart and Jive software have their own USPs and are holding their own in this emerging enterprise marketplace.
At this point it is difficult to tell who will win out – the platform/suite players or the niche pure-play Web 2.0 vendors. One thing is for sure: those who address the problems of interoperability and integration of these new technologies with legacy systems, identity management and security, will be benefited the most.
Post contributed by Sabapathy Narayanan, Aspire Systems
Related posts
- Consumer Internet and Enterprise Space This is the fourth part in the series on New...
- Enterprise Maintenance Gateway – A Made in India Software Product This week we feature Enterprise Maintenance Gateway a product developed...
- How Startups and Emerging companies can benefit from Social web and Enterprise 2.0(Friday’s 2.0 – 39th session) How Startups and Emerging companies can benefit from Social web...
- Why is Private Enterprise still “Dirty” in India? Why is Private Enterprise still “Dirty” in India? I have...
- Social Commerce continued…2.0 And the reasons Social Commerce is the next big opportunity;...
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
Nice article. Though, one thing needs to be pointed out is that the basic idea of ROI is probably something which doesnt stand to reason with something like experience … and hence, we probably need something quite different from ROI to calculate the contribution of web 2.0 technologies. Challenge is, how do you convince your boss!
Atul, I beg to differ on the ROI issue for Web 2.0, since I believe it is completely justifiable – and I speak from our own experience at PK4. We routinely use the following argument in our discussions with prospects and that works well. Let me explain.
For this discussion, allow me to ignore the hype about W2.0 technologies and assume that it delivers value in just two ways: that user-interfaces have keyboard-sensitive fields and that parts of a page are updated independent of the rest. In Impel (our SaaS CRM), we chose to implement W2.0 mechanisms on some of its most popular transactions. With that roll-out on just 10 or 12 major add/edit pages, users spent less than a fourth of the time they took earlier to complete those transactions. And on the infrastructure side, server demand for those pages fell by over 60%, giving us the ability to host a lot more users with a lot less iron. So both components contributed to overall cost-savings.
Let me give you a specific example. We recently moved an earlier in-premise customer of ours to the on-demand mode. One of the reasons they bought the on-demand solution was because, based on their user-count, we demonstrated a saving of over 7,000 user-hours per year, largely due to the on-demand solution being W2.0-enabled (the in-premise solution was not).
Bottom-line, IMHO, Enterprise savings due to W2.0 are significant and can be specifically quantified.
All the best with convincing your boss!
Web 2.0 will enable enterprises focus on their core competence alone and access the required software applications thru browser from anywhere at a fractional cost.
While the operational cost comes down significantly there is a real good opportunity to increase revenues with focus only on core competence.
Interesting read Sabapathy,
With applications such as Enterprise 2.0 being evangelized and implemented across the corporate length and breadth, the skepticism on the ROI factor would soon fade away.
I personally feel, people/companies evangelizing the cross boundary integration techniques, leveraging the power of web 2.0 and the mobile platform would be marching ahead.
Not just knowledge management, Enterprise 2.0 applications have a wide array of interoperable implementability, across many other industries apart from IT.
Hope to see innovation reaching new heights and Entrepreneurs rising up to the 2.0 occasion!
Best,
ParitoshS