Are You Seeing Growth in the Enterprise 2.0 Market Even in Difficult Times?

Jevon MacDonald posted an interesting piece in Fast Forward, In uncertain times, Enterprise 2.0 takes the stage. Jevon began with the statement that, “for many people the positioning of Enterprise 2.0 as a cost reduction engine is not new. Complexity reduction, efficiency increases and fast response times have been the cornerstone of many Enterprise Social Software pitches in the last 5 years.” He concluded, “In a time of uncertainty such as we have seen in the past several months, new and promising technologies may prove to be the safest harbour for those who must continue to deliver growth.” I certainly agree.

In a related post, I wrote on Potential Social Software Winners in our New Economic World. In that post, I reported a conversation with Ali Riaz of Attivio about the potential impact of the current economic crisis on technology adoption. He noted that some of the large enterprise application providers are seeing decreasing sales. For example, SAP, has recently issued earnings warnings (via Jevon MacDonald). At the same time, Ali said they are finding an increasing demand at Attivio for their BI-search combination as companies want to better understand what is happening within their enterprise and customer base.

Now another enterprise 2.0 vendor, MindTouch, has now announced significant growth in Revenue, Customers and Partners. They are the developers of MindTouch Deki, a wiki-based collaboration platform for enterprise collaboration and mashups. (see my post - Deki Wiki Tees Itself Up as Your Intranet) Their reported growth benchmarks include: 368 percent increase in customers in the last 12 months through October of this year, 612 percent increase in revenue over the previous year, 132 percent growth in partners, value added resellers and system integrators and thousands in daily distribution and millions of users globally. MindTouch said that “customers and industry experts cite the immediate gains in productivity and operational efficiency afforded MindTouch Deki users as the cause for the dramatic growth in customer acquisition and new partners.”

Mindtouch also quoted Michael Coté, industry analyst with analyst firm RedMonk.
"When belts tighten, businesses don't have the option to do less, they just need to pay less. So called Enterprise 2.0 software has been trying to streamline and modernize aging approaches to collaborative software for sometime now, and products like MindTouch Deki are results of those efforts. For companies looking to keep their collaborative applications up-to-date and cut back on costs at the same time, the crop of Enterprise 2.0 software that Deki belongs to is worth investigating.”

I think this is good news for MindTouch but also good news for enterprise 2.0 in general. It also makes sense to me. These tools are both relatively lower cost and also potentially led to both innovation and cost reductions. I have heard similar comments in informal conversation with other vendors in this space. That is why I am cross–posting this from Fast Forward to ask the question to more people. What are you hearing from venders? If you are a vendor, do you have similar results to report?

Comments

[Jordan Frank]

More evidence from the trenches, at Traction Software we are seeing record revenue and a sixth year of growth since our market launch.

http://traction.tractionsoftware.com/traction/permalink/Blog871

Insofar as the direction the market is taking, in a time of belt tightening, enterprises large and small are looking to do more with less. Timed coincidentally at time when Enterprise 2.0 products like Traction TeamPage are both Enterprise ready and very well understood by users and IT folk alike, its a recipe for a major shift from traditional CMS based Collaborative Workspace software. Here is my analysis on the directional shift and where the economy will favor - or hinder - different types of vendors:

http://traction.tractionsoftware.com/traction/permalink/Blog904

[Bill Ives]

Jordan - Thanks for sharing this good news. It is reassuring the see this continued strength in our market sector during these times. Good luck going forward. Bill