Enterprise Social Software Growing Rapidly


Enterprise Social Software Growing Rapidly

Bangalore: The demand for social softwares among enterprises is soaring and this demand is likely to accelerate in coming years, as increasing enterprises are deploying the product in an effort to improve collaboration and communication primarily not only among employees, but also with customers, according to IDC.

The research firm also highlighted that enterprise social software will be a $4.5 billion market in 2016, up from $800 million in 2011. That growth represents a 42.4 percent compound annual growth rate.

With enterprise software giants like SAP, Oracle, Salesforce.com, Microsoft and others talking up social applications and snapping up parts of a stack, there is a strong growth in the social software market.

"We're seeing good strong growth from the major players in this market and that'll continue for quite a while," said Michael Fauscette, lead author IDC reports. In addition he also said that because these social platforms hold the potential for sharpening employee communication they're becoming important tools for "decision support" and productivity across most industry verticals.

According to IDC’s "Worldwide Enterprise Social Software 2012-2016 Forecast" customers spent US$767.4 million on the products globally in 2011, and will spend approximately around $4.5 billion in 2016.

However according Forrester forecast in December 2011 the market size will touch $6.4 billion in 2016 while IDC had a more conservative estimate of $4.5 billion in the same timeframe.

As Mr Michael Fauscette, Group Vice-President for IDC’s Software Business Solutions Group, wrote: “Companies will increasingly want to integrate and even embed social software into all enterprise applications, so it is essential for vendors to provide open APIs (Application Programming Interface) and capabilities to put social software into the enterprise workflow.’’