Why large enterprises aren’t joining the Web2.0 love-fest
Richard MacManus over at Read/Write Web talks about why large enterprises aren’t jumping on board with Web2.0 applications just yet. Richard’s article specifically discusses a Forrester Research article entitled “‘CIOs Want Suites For Web 2.0″ and discusses Forrester’s findings rather well. According to Richard’s post …
“Apparently CIOs have a strong desire to purchase web 2.0 products ‘as a suite, as well as an equally strong desire to purchase these technologies from large, incumbent software vendors.‘”
Working for a large enterprise myself, I have to say - this really doesn’t come as much of a surprise to me. Apparently Wikis and RSS are the apps that are “most likely to be adopted” by enterprises … and I know that my employer uses both rather heavily. But what about the other types of Web2.0 apps? Well, first off - I think it’s obvious that a lot of the purely social apps like Digg, Flickr, MySpace, etc. don’t have a much of a play in the enterprise space. Nothing surprising about that. But there is an entire class of Web2.0 applications - project management apps, word processors, spreadsheets, etc. that clearly would be useful for most any business whether large or small. So why aren’t enterprises considering these applications a bit more seriously?
In time, I believe that they will - but for now, my personal opinion is that one of the major hold-backs is the fact that many of these applications operate strictly in a software-as-a-service/software-on-demand mode … in many cases, meaning that all the corporate data housed in the application is stored outside of the corporation’s four walls.
Case in point - BaseCamp. A well-designed software-as-a-service implementation of a project management suite, and one of the more beautiful examples of Web2.0 technology. Everything about this application is beautiful when you think about what it could do for managing large, complex projects with a combination of internal resources, external client resources, external vendor resources, etc. I can manage a project or two ok on my own, but I know I could be even more efficient with a tool like this that can track everything - milestones, timelines, documents, etc.
And therein, lies the problem. Everything I would need to track for a project - tasks, milestones, design documents, product release schedules, etc. must be stored on Basecamp’s servers. Working for an enterprise of over 30,000 employees globally - I can tell you without a doubt that storing information like that externally would violate nearly every internal confidentiality policy we have on the books. But Basecamp does not offer a “host it yourself” version of thier application. It’s their way, or the highway.
So as questions arise as to why more enterprises aren’t embracing the Web2.0 love fest, it’s worthwhile considering whether or not the Web2.0 application vendors are really trying to considering the enterprise’s needs or not. If Basecamp offered a hosted version of their application, I could probably convince my employer to buy it overnight (or at least, our division would buy it and start using it) for our own internal project management. Until the day when Web2.0 vendors show that they’re truly interested in the enterprise space, it’s not surprising to me that the enterprise space isn’t showing much interest in them.