Last week, Forrester published a report entitled, "Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Market Forecast: 2007 To 2013”. The money quote is…

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.

There has been a lot of discussion in the blogosphere about this report (here and here, for a couple examples) but there is one point that I haven’t seen anybody touch on yet. In the report, “Enterprise 2.0” is defined as standalone offerings in areas like social networking, mashups, and RSS. At Helpstream, we feel that the real impact of Enterprise 2.0 is going to be the incorporation of Web 2.0 capabilities within business process applications like CRM, customer service, etc.

For example, in the area of customer service, we feel there is a huge opportunity for vendors to leverage the knowledge of their customer community in order to increase customer satisfaction and reduce their support costs. As a result, we have incorporated what we call “community collaboration” capabilities within our offering. These capabilities enable customers to interact among themselves to address certain problems.

We believe the incorporation of Web 2.0 capabilities within business process applications will have a significant impact on businesses. Although it is probably difficult to measure, this type of capability will make enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies by 2013 far greater than the $4.6 billion estimated by Forrester.

Phil Wainewright of ZDNet recently posted a blog entry entitled, “Eight reasons SaaS will surge in 2008.” One of his reasons addresses the embracing of SaaS within the IT department…

Enterprise IT embraces SaaS. Here’s an interesting take from Microsoft SaaS architecture expert Gianpaolo Carraro: “Similarly to what happened about 10-12 years ago where the growth of the Intra-net was faster than the Inter-net (certainly in terms of $ if not in global terms), in 2008 SaaS … will grow faster inside the corporate boundaries than outside.” Of course, it’s in Microsoft’s interests to see enterprises deploying SaaS internally (and thus having to buy more server licenses to do so) than it is to have them consuming SaaS externally (especially when the external SaaS vendors are typically running Unix-based data centers and using open source platforms). In my view there will also be a lot of the latter going on, because contrary to popular opinion, many IT folk like the low-cost, low-maintenance, low-resource profile of externally delivered SaaS applications. But if others want to try deploying their own SaaS applications internally, I’m not going to stand in their way. It’ll be a great learning experience for them and for the platform vendors they work with.

We’ve seen similar trends in feedback from our IT users when we ask them why they like our service as a help desk solution. Their comments tend to focus on satisfaction with ease of use and how quickly they can experience value with the solution (related to Phil's point on how IT people like the low-cost, low-maintenance, low-resource profile of externally delivered SaaS applications).

An important by-product of IT departments using SaaS solutions is that they not only become less of a barrier for other departments’ use of SaaS applications but they can also become a promoter of SaaS within a company. We have already seen this. There have been a few occasions when IT users, who are using our service as a help desk solution, have recommended their Customer Support department to use Helpstream for customer support as well.

Today, we are launching our company blog. We will use this blog as a forum to provide you with updates on our company and our service, as well as to communicate our perspective on what’s happening in the marketplace.

You may have noticed that we have another blog, called Tech Zone, which is authored by our Chief Architect, Dan Hardy. As we move forward, Tech Zone will focus on the more technical aspects about the Helpstream service (the stuff that we think techies are interested in).

We hope you enjoy our blog and we would love to hear from you – your thoughts, comments, suggestions are appreciated.