Oliver Young, an analyst at Forrester Research, stated that despite there being a lot of buzz about the consumer market for web 2.0 applications, "the greatest opportunity today for vendors is in the business-to-business collaboration space".

For the technologies that Forrester is most bullish on, social networking and wikis, the report stated that the "cultural resistance" to social networks will "eventually break, allowing workers to connect with like-minded colleagues and enabling a collaboration channel that previously didn't exist in the enterprise." On wikis, Forrester noted that users have already reported success with wiki projects and it expects this to grow even more. Wikis are most successful, said Forrester, when sponsored by business leaders and connected to business processes.

Forrester estimated in April that the enterprise 2.0 market will hit $4.6 billion by 2013. They also predicted in October that enterprise 2.0 apps will fall dramatically in price. So while the overall value of enterprise web applications will increase, the amount vendors charge for them is expected to decline over time.

RIAs in the enterprise; source: Forrester

The report states that today, enterprise portals and Microsoft Office are the most common front ends "through which content, collaboration, enterprise applications, and other services are delivered to workers in a seamless, contextual way." However, says Forrester, RIA technology is improving that user experience and is being increasingly used by mid to large enterprises. The report states:

"Because RIAs improve the way people find and manipulate content, complete transactions, and consume multimedia content, these technologies are ideal for improving the user experience for information workers. Moving forward, RIA technologies like Adobe Flash and Flex, Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), Ajax, the Curl RIA Platform, Laszlo Systems OpenLaszlo and Webtop, Microsoft Silverlight, Nexaweb’s Enterprise Web 2.0 Suite, Oracle WebCenter, and Sun JavaFX will be used to augment or even replace traditional enterprise portals and Microsoft Office as IW front ends."

The report goes on to say that RIA-based Information Workplaces create a "seamless, individualized, and visual" environment for information workers.

A lot of the report is based on data gained from vendors with a horse in the RIA race; including Adobe, Microsoft, Curl, Laszlo Systems, among others. Plus information gleaned from RIA specialists. So we should take the findings with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, the amount of RIA activity happening on the Web today suggests that the enterprise will indeed be mined. Just as consumer web apps have made their way into the Enterprise over the past few years, so will RIA infiltrate the office. It's also worth pointing out that Google, with its army of AJAX office apps, will be among the RIA providers vying to be a front end in the enterprise.

Young gives three reasons he things deployment of web 2.0 will sneak onto enterprise agendas in 2008:

1. IT guys are already using web 2.0 - According to Young, many IT departments and shops have been using web 2.0 tools for internal tasks like project management and support ticketing. The utility of these deployments will encourage them to push web 2.0 tools out more broadly in the enterprise.
2. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em - When big business is unable to stem the use of Software as a Service tools and things like social networks by employees, rather than allow untested software and services on their networks, they will "mitigate risk by deploying enterprise-class tools in their stead."
3. They make you look cool - "For IT departments aspiring to be more relevant to the business," writes Young, "enterprise web 2.0 tools will be a high-impact, low-cost method to show leadership and innovation."

RSS Will Lead the Way

Forrester predicts that RSS will be the most popularly deployed web 2.0 tool in the enterprise over the coming year. "Forrester expects 2008 to be a banner year for RSS and specifically enterprise RSS," says Young, concluding that many of the companies that discovered utility in blogs and wikis last year will realize that RSS is necessary to push that content to users. "While 9% of enterprise firms expect to consider the use of RSS in 2008, we believe that number will be close to 20% by year-end."

But while RSS might be the most important driver of enterprise web 2.0 adoption in 2008, Forrester expects social networking to still be the buzz word du jour. "Expect the adoption of social networking solutions for business to accelerate dramatically in 2008 with many firms looking for internal social networking solutions," predicts the research firm.

While Forrester expects the big boys -- IBM, Jive, etc. -- to rule the roost, they note that "nearly any vendor that uses the term 'social networking' will get at least some consideration." Though, Forrester also expects Microsoft SharePoint to "steamroll" the market, and will reap the most rewards from a shift toward web 2.0 thinking in the enterprise market.

Though the report puts a lot of stock in RSS and social networking, according to their enterprise survey, the technologies that more enterprises are actually planning to invest in over the next 12 months are discussion boards and wikis. Forrester, though, expects that it is these technologies that will drive the further adoption of RSS.

What do you think? Is the enterprise ready for web 2.0? Has web 2.0 already arrived in the enterprise? Lets us know in the comments below.

Further, says the feisty startup, while Google can only produce "an unnamed telco" as its first enterprise customer, Zimbra boasts Comcast (the largest ISP in the US) and Embarq (formerly Sprint LLC) as customers. Other Zimbra customers include Raytheon, H&R Block, and Century 21 - who use Zimbra for messaging, document sharing, and enterprise collaboration.

So Google is taking it from all sides currently - from arch-rival Microsoft, and Web Office startups. It shows just how much of a threat Google is in office software.

I'm very pleased to announce that Susan Scrupski (a.k.a. "ITSinsider") has joined ReadWriteWeb as our VP Enterprise Content and Programs. Starting today, Susan will assume responsibility for building our editorial and expertise in applying the principals of Web 2.0 to the Enterprise. With a focus on how the Web is disrupting traditional business processes and operations, our Enterprise channel (which will soon be re-launched with a new design) will focus on new products, case studies, and innovative developments involving Web strategy and execution in a B2B context. Yes, B2B is back!

Susan is the fourth full-time member of ReadWriteWeb, after myself (the founder), Marshall Kirkpatrick who joined us full-time in August as VP Content Development, and Bernard Lunn who became COO in December. The rest of our staff are contractors. I am proud of the whole team we have managed to put together without external funding.

Please join me in welcoming Susan into her new role. We have big plans for ReadWriteWeb and we're grateful for the continued support of our readers and sponsors.

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When I first heard about DataMashups.com, I immediately wondered if they are targeting non-technical users as well as developers - given that Ning has had problems gaining traction amongst non-developers (who Ning targeted). Tony Thomas from DataMashups.com explained:

"We're clearly targeting the developer market. We're relatively recent to the online development idea, having been quietly working on distributed data and data integration. But once we got into the model of doing the development online, we see a lot of potential for this technology in the enterprise. Having such tools setup in the enterprise could open the door to interesting new applications with enterprise data, since enterprise developers can try out new applications with no setup required, and small investments of their time."

So the enterprise is a key market for DataMashups.com. Is there a consumer market aspect to their plans too? Tony said:

"We're not as sure about the online service, and whether there is a viable business there. It should serve as an easy way for new prospects to try the product, and expose us to new ideas and requirements. But we do not expect it to be a significant revenue opportunity for us. Would be great to be surprised on the upside there, but we're not expecting that."

Check out DataMashups.com and let me know how it compares to Ning, Zoho Creator and the recently launched Dabble DB (my write-up of that is on ZDNet).

Forrester sent a free copy of the report to Read/WriteWeb, so here is a quick review of its contents.

I think we all know about the issue of information overload - and the resulting value of good filters and smart aggregators. In some ways the problem is worse for enterprise employees - because as well as external news sources, they have potentially hundreds of internal RSS feeds to track via company blogs and wikis.

In the report, Forrester recommends that companies purchase "an enterprise RSS solution". Three vendors in particular are mentioned: Attensa, KnowNow, and NewsGator. Each of these vendors has an RSS solution that runs behind the firewall. The below diagram from Forrester nicely captures the value that such solutions provide:

Apart from things like filtering, collaboration and access control, enterprise RSS solutions typically integrate in some manner with existing corporate systems. A good example:

"KnowNow, for example, can effectively "RSS-ify" corporate data, taking important events, updates, or status changes that reside in disparate systems like ERP, CRM, and supply chain management (SCM) and syndicate them to appropriate stakeholders. Wells Fargo uses KnowNow to monitor customer data and warehouse schemas, routing inconsistencies and problems to appropriate business analysts in real-time."

Conclusion

In the world of web 2.0 blogs, not as much attention is paid to enterprise RSS solutions as consumer RSS solutions (Google Reader, Pageflakes, Feedburner and so forth). But if you're looking to introduce RSS into your company or organization, then you should certainly look closely at services like Attensa, KnowNow, and NewsGator. If anyone knows of alternative solutions, please note them in the comments.

There's also the issue of how RSS is being adopted in the enterprise - and the Forrester report suggests that it still hasn't reached much beyond PR, IT and marketing people. HR and R&D people are showing good signs of adopting it, but comments from the Forrester report such as "knowledge managers will need to RSS enable internal content" [for R&D people] show that there is still a lot of work to be done.

• Enterprise 2.0
• Online Collaboration
• The Implicit Web
• Collective Intelligence
• The Semantic Web
• Mash-ups
• Social Networking in the Enterprise
• Next-level Discovery

You can register for Defrag here. Entering the code "rww1" will get RWW readers $200 off of the early bird price.

This week I spoke to Ross Mayfield, CEO of wiki company SocialText, about "Enterprise 2.0". To put it very crudely, Enterprise 2.0 means blogs and wikis in the enterprise. According to Ross and others, Enterprise 2.0 is slightly different to the "Office 2.0" or Web Office meme also doing the rounds. In our discussion Ross defined Enterprise 2.0 as "free form social software adapted for enterprises". Rod Boothby says it means "Emergence Software", while M.R. Rangaswami of Sand Hill Group wrote an in-depth article to try and explain the concept.

I have to admit I'm less concerned with how the term is defined (or even what term we use), than where the market for web-based software is heading and what products are out there right now. So let's get to the nitty gritty...

Like JotSpot, which we profiled on Read/WriteWeb recently, SocialText aims to extend the notion of wikis. Or as Ross put it at the time of the SocialText 2.0 launch:

"The solution isn't turning the wiki into yet-another-enterprise-tool, but to raise the bar on what a wiki can be, while making it open and extensible."

Best of breed apps vs office software incumbents

In our talk, Ross said that enterprise software incumbents will enter the market next year. For example Microsoft's Sharepoint will bundle in blogs and wikis and IBM Websphere will have wiki modules. But Ross' theory is that there are a number of "best of breed" web applications that are well positioned to compete against the big companies.

SocialText itself is positioning itself as "best of breed wiki application". Other best of breed apps mentioned by Ross were SixApart (blogs) and Newsgator or Attensa (enterprise RSS). In contrast Sharepoint, said Ross, is a suite that is "trying to be everything to everybody". So he believes there is still room for best of breed web innovation.

This is something I've long been a proponent of too. In February this year, I wrote a post entitled Web Office Suite: best of breed products. In that post I listed out a number of best of breed Web Office apps - like Gmail, Zimbra, BaseCamp. These are web apps that are Web Native and take full advantage of what the Web has to offer - plus they are focused on certain core functionalities.

The other point here is that we're talking about a new breed of enterprise software. Wikis and blogs are part of that, but there are many more hybrid Web Office apps in active development that are changing the game for office software - Zimbra, Morfik, Dabble DB are just a few examples.

Search Server Express shares nearly the same feature set as the company's more robust enterprise search products, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Search Server. Microsoft will also release a paid version of the product, which allows business users to search internal computer systems in addition to the web at large, that will basically be the same as the free edition but licensed to run on multiple servers.

"We really believe enterprise search is at a tipping point," Jared Spataro, group product manager for enterprise search, told CNET. "We really think people will look back on this time as the time when search went from just being a consumer tool to one that businesses can harness."

Because Search Server Express delivers web results from Live.com, a popular free enterprise search product could have a positive effect on Microsoft's consumer web search strategy as well. According to Spataro, only 1 percent of 6 million business are doing enterprise search. Microsoft hopes that a free and easily deployed search application will remove any entry barriers that businesses may have to hopping on the enterprise search bandwagon. Competition is stiff, however, with competing products being offered by Google and IBM/Yahoo, as well as a number of smaller firms.

I have known Scott for many years, and he and I last worked together back in 2005 when I ran TomsHardware.com. One of our most memorable moments from that era was getting a briefing at the offices of Morgan Freeman's production company and hearing the challenges with getting personal video copies for Freeman's wife and getting around DRM issues. Scott is one of our industry's most facile writers and I am excited to have him on our staff. Scott lives in Indianapolis, Ind. and you can reach him at scott@readwriteweb.com.

I have written several pieces recently about the Extended Enterprise trend, covering Segments such as Collaboration, CRM and PLM.

In the same vein, that I have proposed a framework for Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS), I would like to discuss in this piece, a framework for Enterprise 3.0.

Fot those working with web technologies, and focused on business applications, the trend to watch carefully is the Extended Enterprise one, which hasn’t quite become mainstream yet.

“Large companies appear to be jumping en masse onto the software-as-a-service bandwagon, according to a new survey of CIOs by management consultants McKinsey & Company. The survey found that 61% of North American companies with sales over $1 billion plan to adopt one or more SaaS applications over the next year, a dramatic increase from the 38% who were planning to install SaaS apps in 2005.”

However, to come up with new ideas, or to position your existing SaaS technology on a problem that matters to customers today, I suggest you focus on the Extended Enterprise trend.

So, let’s recap the vocabulary again. What is the Extended Enterprise (EE)?

The modern enterprise is no longer one, monolithic organization. Customers, Partners, Suppliers, Outsourcers, Distributors, Resellers, … all kinds of entities extend and expand the boundaries of the enterprise, and make “collaboration” and “sharing” important.

Let’s take some examples. The salesforce needs to share leads with distributors and resellers. The Product Design team needs to share CAD files with parts suppliers. Customers and Vendors need to share workspace often. Consultants, Contractors, Outsourcers often need to seamlessly participate in the workflow of a project, share files, upload information. All of this across a secure, seamlessly authenticated system.

Few of these Extended Enterprise stakeholders are inside the firewall. They don’t necessarily have accounts in the Enterprise IT network, posing challenges and creating friction in the workflow.

If you are designing an application that does either Expertise Location, Talent Management, or Contract Management using web 2.0 technologies, remember that you need to provide access control options to include these off-enterprise team members.

The reason I like this framework, is that companies are facing the full impact of globalization today, and yet their IT systems were designed a long time back - without any provision for managing this Extended Enterprise architecture. Thus, if you do come up with an architecture that successfully manages the workflow of EE, focused on a specific application, chances are you have hit some ready CIO painpoint and, therefore, appetite.

So, let’s try to use this framework: Enterprise 3.0 = (SaaS + EE), and see if it can help us hone the architectural design, as well as the application positioning.

Sramana Mitra is an Entrepreneur, Founder CEO of 3 companies, Strategy Consultant to 50+ companies, and Author of a popular technology business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy.

Now, Apple has released another tool to extend the functionality, allowing enterprises to access logs and install apps on iPhones as well as configure them.

The iPhone Configuration Utility is available exclusively for enterprises running Mac OS X. Enterprises can use any of the three tools to create a configuration file and email or post the file to a web site. The file is in XML format and can be installed onto the company's iPhones with the following settings pre-configured:

• Device security policies
• VPN configuration information
• Wi-Fi settings, APN settings
• Exchange account settings
• Mail settings
• Certificates that permit iPhone and iPod touch devices to work with your enterprise systems

The difference between the tools is that the iPhone Configuration Web Utilities allow enterprises to create config files while the iPhone Configuration Utility for Max OS X allows enterprises to also access logs and install apps on iPhones.

Breaking Ground in the Enterprise Market

Unfortunately, Apple is choosing to limit their reach within enterprises by only allowing the Configuration Utility to work on enterprises running Mac OS X. There is a relatively small number of enterprises running their OS when compared with those running Windows operating systems. However, we're hopeful that Apple will soon release the same functionality for enterprises running Windows. All of these tools are available for free in the Enterprise Support section of the Apple's website. For more information on integrating iPhones within your enterprise, we recommend checking out the Enterprise Deployment Guide (Third Edition)(PDF).

Enterprise RSS software company Attensa has announced a partnership with The Real Time Matrix Corp, which develops search and filtering technology. The partnership aims to help enterprise users create focused search channels - essentially topic feeds. Craig Barnes, Attensa CEO, calls this an "RSS Tuner", which is a nice term signifying that they are trying to separate "signal from noise".

Attensa's product range is based on RSS Reader and Feed Server technology. Meanwhile The Real Time Matrix has just released a product called the iJ.am search engine, which they describe as a "Content Router for the Web". It sounds to me a lot like PubSub, which up till its demise last year was the leading RSS keyword filter and delivery service. In the press release, Jeff Whitehead, The Real Time Matrix CEO, is quoted as saying:

"Users simply set up and refine their search criteria and we deliver accurate, relevant and timely results with extreme prejudice."

Indeed Whitehead uses (intentionally or not) a phrase close to PubSub's former 'future search' catchphrase. Whitehead says that Attensa and Real Time Matrix will make it possible to "search the past and filter the future".

There's certainly more room for RSS aggregation and filtering technology in the enterprise. Attensa, KnowNow, Newsgator and others are all active in this space - so it's quite an open market. If you know of other such enterprise products out there, let us know in the comments.

Google Web Security for Enterprise provides three main areas of protection: 1) web virus and spyware protection, 2) web filtering and content control, and 3) protection for roaming and remote users. Services such as these aren't anything new to I.T. administrators, but they often come in the form of expensive software suites, hardware appliances, or, more often, a combination of both. With the Google Web Security product, the goal is to provide enterprises with the same type of security and protection that they are used to, but all under the Google brand.

Controlling Web Access for End Users

How It Compares

The advantage of using a service such as this over a hardware firewall solution for example, is that with the firewall the protections offered to remote workers would only be activated when an employee is connected to the company network via VPN. With the Google Web Security for Enterprise service, which can't be disabled by the end user, workers would always be protected.

However, when comparing the Google offering to some other enterprise level software products, like Symantec's Endpoint Protection suite for example, the Google product comes up short in a few areas. Although this particular Symantec product doesn't offer web content filtering, it does provide certain fine-grained application and device controls. These are tools which let I.T. admins lock down endpoints to prevent data leakage by controlling access to specific processes, files, and folders by users and other applications as well as by controlling what peripherals can be connected to a machine.

The Google product does not address these concerns which are still very much a factor in larger organizations or those that deal with sensitive data, so I.T. administrators would still have to utilize other software suites in addition to the Web Security for Enterprise product to provide complete endpoint protection.

Web Security-as-a-Service

That being said, this new service is definitely moving Google closer to being a true competitor in the realm of enterprise security, as they already offer email security and compliance tools. Plus, the convenience of having all the services available in the cloud makes this a compelling offering if the price, yet to be announced, is right.