* What businesses think of Enterprise 2.0
Siemens Communications, one of the world’s leading vendors of open communications products for enterprises recently sponsored an IDC study to examine how the enterprise market is combining unified communications, Web 2.0 technologies, and business applications to improve business operations. A white paper that summarizes key findings from the study, titled “Enterprise Communications 2.0: Creating Competitive Advantage,” can be found here.
The paper introduces the concept of “Enterprise 2.0,” suggesting that bringing together implementation of Web 2.0, unified communications, and existing business applications can enable new ways of working.
In a statement announcing the study results, Mark Winther, IDC group vice president, Worldwide Telecommunications, said: “With all the mobile capabilities and dynamic collaboration required by virtual teams, the threat of fragmented communications derailing corporate goals of more productivity and competitiveness while lowering costs has never been greater. What’s needed is an open communications environment that combines unified communications with IT platforms and business process integration along with other streamlining capabilities.”
The survey interviewed execs from 100 U.S. companies with more than 5,000 employees. Sixty-two percent of enterprises believe that the number of mobile employees will increase and 40% believe that the number of virtual teams within the company will increase. Yet while 89% of U.S.-based large enterprises surveyed agree that an Enterprise 2.0 environment within a virtual team is useful or very useful, on average only 22% of the enterprises had actually deployed features for the services surveyed.
Our analysis: We have long maintained that VoIP and unified communications deployments need to take improving business process into account, and we have observed that integrating business applications into a unified communications platform is an important long-term convergence goal. Adding business plans to integrate Web 2.0 into what IDC coins an “Enterprise 2.0” environment is one step further down the convergence path and makes sense to improve both internal and external communications.
