20% employees to use ‘social’ network

‘In the past,organizations supported collaboration through e-mail and highly structured applications only,’ said Monica Basso,research Vice President at Gartner.

While microblogging is reshaping enterprise communications,business communications are evolving. Newer employees will enter the workforce with a predisposition to communicate via a social network,but will use e-mail in parallel – optimizing

the business need with the communication modality.

‘The rigid distinction between e-mail and social networks will erode,’ Basso said. ‘E-mail will take on many social attributes,such as contact brokering,while social networks will develop richer e-mail capabilities.’

Vendors like Microsoft and IBM will add links to internal and external social networks from within e-mail clients and servers,making services such as contacts,calendars and tasks shareable across e-mail and social networks.

By 2012,Gartner said contact lists,calendars and messaging clients in any smartphone will be social-enabled applications.

Collaboration is slowly moving to the cloud and Gartner analysts expect to see steep growth for sales of premises and cloud-based social networking services. Organizations will deploy hybrid models where some services live on-premises and some are in the cloud.

Gartner predicts that the percentage of e-mail accounts on cloud services will grow to 10 per cent by year-end 2012,up seven per cent from 2009.

From a vendor’s perspective,the market is consolidating around Microsoft and Research In Motion (RIM),the two market leaders. Gartner forecasts that by 2012,RIM and Microsoft will own 80 per cent of enterprise wireless e-mail software market.

“The reality is that mobile collaboration will increase for all categories of workers,and organizations can either take

the lead,or be led by their users,” she said.