Freemium cloud solutions mobilize enterprise social collaboration market toward $3.5 billion by 2016

NEW YORK, USA: The latest global enterprise social collaboration market forecasts show revenues will reach $3.5 billion by 2016. In 2010, the market registered 51.7 percent year-on-year growth to reach $898.6 million. Cloud-based freemium services are spurring adoption, and volumes are set to see an even higher CAGR between 2011 and 2016.

Positive social media experiences in the consumer world have prompted users to demand the services in the enterprise as well. Applications convergence, business process integration, and technology consolidation have been three key adoption drivers of social platforms in the enterprise.

Cloud-based platforms are gaining increasing relevance as vendors believe a cloud strategy is indispensable with the market becoming truly multi-modal and the number of social interactions over mobile devices increasing exponentially.

“Mobility is emerging as a key functionality across all platform offerings,” says Dan Shey, practice director, mobile services. “Vendors realize the cloud is a powerful facilitator for application mobilization and federation across multiple devices compared to premises-based solutions.”

The enterprise social collaboration vendor landscape is also seeing rapid changes in terms of market leadership and vendor growth. Shey comments, “SharePoint implementations are pervasive. However, smaller vendors are building solutions with compelling ‘social’ features that can integrate well with SharePoint, bridging significant solution gaps and addressing critical market needs.”