ReadWriteWeb

According to Forrester Research, we're in the initial phases of a new 16-year cycle of technology innovation and growth called "IT Everywhere." This shift comes on the heels of the previous cycle which brought us networked computing technologies for our enterprise applications and the Internet. During this transitional period, CIOs need to be aware of which trends from the older cycle are still important and which of the new trends they should also be paying attention to. Forrester has summed up their findings in a recent report which focuses on these emerging trends.

A one year follow up on a study of social media adoption at 500 of the fastest growing companies in the US has found that familiarity with and use of blogs, podcasting, wikis, online video and social networking has skyrocketed in 2008 to nearly double what it was in 2007. 77% of respondents now report at least some use of a social media tool in their business.

The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research performed the study for Inc. Magazine and their findings confirm what previous studies have argued as well: social media use is now a major, mainstream activity.

ReadWriteWeb is a partner with Defrag, a conference about web innovation. Defrag's Eric Norlin has lately been blogging about enterprises and organizations starting to move beyond mere 'cost containment' (although that's still a big driver) and into using web technologies to boost productivity. Eric points out that "taming the data" is one of the challenges of this shift, because there is so much information online which workers need to process. And it's not just taming the data, but gleaning 'intelligence' from it. He mentions a number of buzzwords: enterprise 2.0, semantic web, business intelligence. Eric's main point is that this space is wide open for innovation - going beyond Webex, social networks and so on.

Part of the problem in the enterprise/business market is the predominance of big, bulky software from large IT vendors such as Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and Oracle. Although most of those companies are slowly evolving into offering web-based software (Cisco owns Webex for example), it tends to be slow progress from all the bigcos except for Google. But nowadays we're seeing startups making a significant impact in the enterprise. There are two main ways this is happening...

Atlassian Confluence, makers of one of the most popular enterprise wiki solutions, has just announced Microsoft Office and SharePoint integration in their latest release, Confluence 2.9. With these new tools, users no longer have to know the technicalities of wiki markup or even how to use the included rich-text WYSIWYG editor in order to make changes to the wiki - they can simply open up a Microsoft Office document instead.

Also, with the addition of the SharePoint connector, Microsoft's well-known collaboration and document sharing platform gets a big dose of Enterprise 2.0 goodness, which is sure to please the end users. However, Confluence makes I.T. happy too, thanks to their inclusion of tools - like LDAP integration and administratively controlled permissions - that are designed just for the needs of the enterprise.

A guest post by Ben Kepes of diversity.net.nz, a blog that focuses on SaaS, cloud-computing and Web 2.0 for the real world.

GroupSwim is an innovative company which has created an intelligent community building and collaboration SaaS solution. It was mentioned here on RWW previously as one of the finalists in the Enterprise 2.0 launch pad. GroupSwim aims to connect individuals and build knowledge utilising social based methodologies. Their method of working comes from four observations of  current offerings and methods of working:

Curl is another player in the RIA (Rich Internet Applications) space, going up against Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe's Flex platform, and OpenLazlo, among others. The Curl platform provides developers a way to build web-based apps that can't be easily built using Ajax or other web-based technologies. Those apps can be deployed both within the web browser or on the desktop via Curl Nitro, an extension of the Curl platform. To show off what Nitro can do, the company has recently released a demo app featuring a visual representation of the Facebook social graph.

By now, you've heard of Adobe AIR - the cross-OS runtime that lets you run rich internet applications on your desktop. We've covered several of our favorite apps in the past, as well as places to find new ones, but so far all we've seen are consumer applications. What about the business world? Will companies ever be using AIR apps on their desktops? As it turns out, many already do and they're as easy to deploy as Adobe Reader.

Most enterprise software sucks. That is my considered opinion from 30 years in the software biz. Words that come to mind are: bloated, inflexible and user hostile. The good news is that it is getting better, a lot better. The driver for change is what I call the consumerization of enterprise software. These new software champions typically have some if not all of these 8 main attributes:

Nine companies are saying "yes," having recently launched Enterprise 2.0 offerings that integrate with SharePoint technology.

If there's one thing that any I.T. pro knows it's the value of "maximizing their investment" in whatever servers they run, technology they use, or services they've signed up for. With strict budgets in place, no I.T. purchases are bought on a whim. Instead, each decision is researched, tested, thoughtfully considered, and, if worthy, purchased, then rolled out to become a part of the I.T. infrastructure. SharePoint is no exception.

How Changing Technology is Having Big Impacts on Business

In case you haven't heard yet - the I.T. world is changing. The rise of social computing technologies, generally branded as "Web 2.0" and including things like wikis, blogs, social networking, RSS, and more are slowly making their way into the business world. This new movement is called Enterprise 2.0, and it's no small shift. They're even having a conference about it next week. But the change encompasses more than just the introduction of new, social software into the formerly stodgy business world - it also includes the movement of server software from in-house data centers to the cloud, the rise of a mobile workforce, the rebirth of thin client computing, a self-provisioning user base, and more.

The Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad program is a program that allows companies to showcase their products and compete for the opportunity to present their ideas to the community at this year's Enterprise 2.0 Conference. This competition, organized by Stowe Boyd, began in April when companies were invited to post their video pitches to the E2 web site. After the community voted, the list of contenders was narrowed down to five finalists who will now compete for the final spot. For that grand prize winner, the prize is free exhibit space at the upcoming conference.

If you're a business who has been ignoring the Web 2.0 trend and the spread of social media: look out, the tide is shifting and you're about to be left behind. The rise of social media didn't happen overnight, the power of the internet to unite people, the ubiquity of broadband, the rise of Gen Y, the development of new technologies for socializing on the web - all of these things and more have led to the rise of social media. And this new force is affecting change in the way that companies do business - now and for many years to come.

A company called DreamFactory based in Mountain View, CA has just launched a new Enterprise 2.0 suite of applications called the "DreamTeam Suite." The suite's social element, which consists of online collaboration between team members, gives the suite its "Enterprise 2.0" flair, a term that loosely applies to any business-ready application integrating concepts from the Web 2.0 world. The DreamTeam Suite also joins other business applications in choosing Amazon's cloud infrastructure for their hosting needs, and then passes the money they've saved by doing so back to their customers.

Yesterday Google announced a new product aimed specifically at Google Apps' enterprise customers. The service, powered by Google acquisition Postini with technology from ScanSafe, is called Google Web Security for Enterprise and it offers real-time malware protection and URL filtering with policy enforcement and reporting. Essentially, it's a big Google firewall in the cloud.

A new report from Forrester Research predicts that mashups will be coming to the enterprise in a big way -- to the tune of a $700 million market by 2013. Mashup platforms that make it easier for consumer to create mashup applications, such as Yahoo! Pipes, Dapper, or Microsoft Popfly, are beginning to have analogues in the enterprise space. "Mashup platforms are in the pole position and ready to grab the lion's share of the market -- and an entire ecosystem of mashup technology and data providers is emerging to complement those platforms," says Forrester analyst G. Oliver Young.

Earlier this month, we opened up and shared with readers the different ways we're pitched by companies wanting coverage. We mentioned our favorite way (hint: RSS) and have been enjoying the feeds that have been sent in since. We also noted the arrival of the twitpitch - the new trend of pitching via Twitter. Meanwhile, another company had a completely different idea: pitch via mail. Yes, postal mail.

A new report released today by Forrester Research is predicting that enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies is going to increase dramatically over the next five years. This increase will include more spending on social networking tools, mashups, and RSS, with the end result being a global enterprise market of $4.6 billion by the year 2013.

Portland, Oregon's Jive Software is launching version 2.0 of its year-old enterprise collaboration suite called Clearspace tonight and it looks like a lot of fun to use.

The service takes on Microsoft's Sharepoint with a feature set that looks like something many consumer software users would be envious of. USAToday recently said that "Jive Software wants to be the Apple Computer of corporate social networks."

Here's another word to add to your lexicon: "Socialprise." It's meaning is somewhat obvious: social tools + enterprise = "socialprise."  It's a new term, but one we hope sticks around, since it's currently representative of one of the biggest shifts in business today. We covered some socialprise tools before, in discussing Worklight, Google Sites, and HiveLive, but here's a new avenue for social tools in the workplace: Social CRM. A company called InsideView is bringing the social web to CRM, and they're not the only one to do so.

HiveLive, a B2B social software platform provider, brings the social web to businesses by providing them with customizable tools like user profiles, blogs, discussion forums, wikis, and RSS which they can skin, edit, and secure easily, and without any coding. The platform is based on a building block called a "Hive," whcihc can be configured to support a range of community activities, like concept brainstorms, product feedback, design reviews, voting centers, and much more.

Recently, HiveLive announced a new partnership with Responsys, a marketing firm whose client list includes some big-name brands like Apple and Salesforce.com. Enterprise 2.0 is sure to follow.