Radicati Group, a leading analyst firm that tracks the messaging and collaboration industry, recently released some suprising data on the size and growth of the business social software market. According to Radicati, the market is expected to be $920 million this year and blossom to over $3.3 billion by 2011. These revenue numbers are staggering and indicate the significant investment that has started in Enterprise 2.0 technologies by business customers. Radicati’s numbers are indeed bullish compared to other analysts like Gartner which published back in July that the social software market would grow from $226 million in 2007 to more than $707 million by 2011.
Regardless of which numbers are accurate, what’s clearly driving this market is the shift of consumer-oriented Web 2.0 tools to the domain of ‘enterprise social computing’ and addressing real business problems. Gartner highlights this trend in a recent study entitled ‘Facebook and the Emerging Social Platform Wars’ and points out “the usefulness of social networking in the enterprise is becoming more visible to large (BEA Systems, Sun, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle) and small (Leverage Software, Spoke, Userplane, Corespeed, Unisfair, Tacit Software, Socialtext) vendors.” Clearly Enterprise 2.0 is more that just hype and the value of social software is shaping up to create a billion (or multi-billion) dollar market opportunity. Read more
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