Last week, Forrester published a report entitled, "Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Market Forecast: 2007 To 2013”. The money quote is…

Enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies will grow strongly over the next five years, reaching $4.6 billion globally by 2013, with social networking, mashups, and RSS capturing the greatest share.

There has been a lot of discussion in the blogosphere about this report (here and here, for a couple examples) but there is one point that I haven’t seen anybody touch on yet. In the report, “Enterprise 2.0” is defined as standalone offerings in areas like social networking, mashups, and RSS. At Helpstream, we feel that the real impact of Enterprise 2.0 is going to be the incorporation of Web 2.0 capabilities within business process applications like CRM, customer service, etc.

For example, in the area of customer service, we feel there is a huge opportunity for vendors to leverage the knowledge of their customer community in order to increase customer satisfaction and reduce their support costs. As a result, we have incorporated what we call “community collaboration” capabilities within our offering. These capabilities enable customers to interact among themselves to address certain problems.

We believe the incorporation of Web 2.0 capabilities within business process applications will have a significant impact on businesses. Although it is probably difficult to measure, this type of capability will make enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies by 2013 far greater than the $4.6 billion estimated by Forrester.