Enterprise 2.0 Roll-up: Social Media as a Necessity

By Chelsi Nakano (@chelkano) Oct 7, 2010 Comments

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Put the fun and games aside. This week we looked at social media in the enterprise as more of a necessity than a trend.

Enterprise Social Media Becomes a Necessity

"If your organization is not using social media to engage employees, it is risking obsolescence," warned Toby Ward , CEO of intranet consulting firm, Prescient Digital Media. Most are on board with this idea, as a survey revealed that a whopping 87% of organization intranets, regardless of size, have enterprise 2.0 tools in place.

Some other interesting numbers with regard to commonly used tools:

53% have intranet blogs (an 18% increase from last year’s survey); 18% have deployed blogs enterprise wide; only 8% have no plans or interest in deploying blogs
52% have intranet discussion forums (a 13% increase from last year’s survey); 23% enterprise use; 9% have no plans or interest
51% have intranet instant messaging (an 11% increase from last year’s survey); 34% enterprise use; 19% have no plans or interest
49% have intranet wikis (a 4% increase from last year’s survey); 17% enterprise deployment; 11% have no plans or interest

Surprised that you don't see mashups or social networking platforms in there? Ward claims they haven't hit the critical masses yet, but are in the process of doing so. Mashups prevalence has increased 75% since last year, while social networking is up 42%.

Another factoid that may come as a surprise: Microsoft is leading the enterprise 2.0 competition. "For those organizations that have deployed 2.0 tools inside the firewall, about half of all organizations have SharePoint (in some shape or form)," continued Ward. "No other vendor is used in more than 20% of organizations (some organizations use multiple solutions).

Out of the 525 participants (representing companies of all sizes from across the globe) the survey found that::

53% of organizations use SharePoint
18% of organizations use WordPress
15% of organizations use Facebook
13% of organizations use Confluence
13% of organizations use Google Sites

Meanwhile, Lotus Connections (Quickr) and SocialText were only present in 5% and 2% of organizations respectively.

Skype Bounces Back with Critical Business Moves

After a less than pleasant 2009, Skype (news, site) is back to prove that it's still the number one VoIP platform. Here's a quick look at some of its latest moves:

Enter New CEO

Skype's CEO Josh Silverman has been replaced by Cisco's own Tony Bates. The once Senior Vice President and General Manager of Ciscos Enterprise, Commercial and Small Business Group, had US$ 20 billion in revenue and 12,500 employees at his old company. Skype’s annual revenue is about one-twentieth of that.

Partnership with Avaya

Though there were recent rumors of Cisco purchasing Skype, the VoIP platform's recent partnership with a sizable unified communications company called Avaya all but obliterates that possibility.