February 8th, 2008
Who's buying into Web 2.0 technologies?
If you are selling Web 2.0 tools, Forrester recommends targeting companies with more than 1,000 employees. In a recent survey of companies of all sizes, Forrester found that larger enterprises are almost twice as likely to pilot or deploy Web 2.0 technologies in 2008 compared to the small and medium flavors.
“The Web 2.0 Buyer Profile: 2008″ ($279) author Oliver Young concluded that “the soft business value of Web 2.0 is clearly a larger deterrent in SMBs than in the enterprise. Most SMBs have neither the brand cachet to sustain customer communities nor the distributed workforce to necessitate a Web 2.0 collaboration deployment.”
However, more than 75 percent of the survey respondents have no plans to invest in wikis, blogs, RSS, tagging, podcasts or social networking tools.
The report indicated that application integration and management and SOA and master data management are top priorities for IT investments. Only 10 percent of respondents
viewed Web 2.0 as a critical priority, and only 6 percent considered software-as-a-service or open source expansion as critical priorities.
Implementing a collaboration strategy was considered a priority or critical priority by 59 percent of respondents. Given that collaboration increasingly involves Web 2.0 technologies, interest in deploying Web 2.0 may may be higher than the report indicates.
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
