Enterprise 2.0 – Is it all just hype?

By Eugene Lee | July 2, 2008, 5:25 pm | 0 Comments

At the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston I was struck by a few things:

There were a LOT of serious businesses (and government organizations) there, and the customer attendance numbers were up significantly from last year. I was particularly impressed by how many companies sent more than one people to the conference and how well-prepared they were.
It was amusing to watch a bunch of Twitter addicts go into withdrawal because the hotel’s WiFi was so dysfunctional.
Customers seem to be moving from “what is it” to “what can I do with it” to “I have a problem identified and am looking for solutions”.

It’s this last trend that’s crucial. This is what transforms an emerging technology category into a sustainable wave that creates success for both customers and for vendors. I’m hoping we can collectively move that trend along by moving the conversation to a pragmatic plane.

There’s real enterprise initiative stuff underneath the huge numbers. Most of the buzz that swirls around this space gets buried behind the really big growth forecasts and vendor buzz – but remember that these numbers come from real research and trends. Forrester analyst G. Oliver Young wrote last month that “56% of North American and European enterprises consider Web 2.0 to be a priority in 2008. A recent survey conducted by AIIM about Enterprise 2.0 applications found that 44 percent of businesses find the technologies “imperative” or “of significant importance” to their organizations.
Buy-side trends and customer success stories show it’s not just buzz — The barriers to Enterprise 2.0 are still strong. But Holbrook said hostile attitudes toward the technologies are changing. This year, he said, Enterprise 2.0 just might break free of its buzzword status. “I’ve seen a big shift over the last year or so where is becoming much more enterprise focused. It’s no longer kind of a phenomenon. It’s a trend that has legs and is not just buzz.” Better still are a number of actual customer case studies hitting the market that show real results.

Innovation is coming back to the Enterprise.

I’ve had lots of conversations recently with people who are most jazzed by the Enterprise 2.0 wave because innovation and VC investment in the enterprise market has been so overshadowed by the consumer side of Web 2.0 When was the last truly innovative trend to affect end users in enterprises?

The Enterprise 2.0 movement is generating so much innovative energy – both on the vendor side (startups and large companies alike) and on the customer side – that it was the first time in years that I saw this much enthusiasm about enterprise software.

I’ll be writing more about this in the next days and weeks and will flesh out some more reflections on what we’re seeing in the market – obstacles, opportunities, and best practices.