Good news for credit crunch squeezed CIOs: the price of enterprise web 2.0 tools is set to plummet.

 

This is an interesting article from http://news.zdnet.com/2424-9595_22-241005.html
According to a new report by Forrester analyst G Oliver Young, the average deal size for web 2.0 tools including blogs, wikis, social networking and enterprise RSS is set to fall over the coming five years, despite an increase in the average number of licenses per business.

The decline in pricing comes on the back of an increasing communization of such software, bundling and subsumption--the inclusion of enterprise 2.0 features into vendors' existing products, negating the need for new standalone offerings.

The report said: "Traditional software vendors have moved aggressively in the direction of web 2.0 software; however, few are offering standalone products. Instead, most, like Microsoft and SAP, are rolling web 2.0 features into existing software packages; in many cases, they are providing the technology at no extra cost … many will make use of them and offset another purchase in the process."

Social networking will see a dramatic decline in pricing, with the cost declining by more than 50 per cent.

"Specialized tools that focus on alumni networks, new employee orientation, and cross-department collaboration may continue to command price premiums, but generally - without significant functional advances in these tools - Forrester is not optimistic: we expect average deployment spend to fall by more than half to $15,300 per customer over the next five years," the report added.

A price drop in blogging will see the software making the smallest dent in CIOs' budgets of all enterprise 2.0 tools. The average cost of a deployment - $14,100 in 2007 - will fall to $6,500 by 2012.

Wikis, too, will see a price drop - from last year's average deployment cost of $16,000 to $7,400 by 2013, with new open source and software-as-a-service entrants into the wiki market helping to drive down the average cost, despite an increased adoption among enterprises.

Meanwhile, the cost of podcast syndication software, enterprise RSS and widgets are also expected to decline over the long term. The only enterprise 2.0 tool to buck the trend is the mashups, where prices will double as the market matures and the technology breaks out of its traditional heartland of the IT department and is taken up by the business at large.

Who will benefit from these plunging prices? The usual roster of software heavyweights looks likely.

"CIOs will look to large incumbent vendors to provide web 2.0 features and functionality to their enterprise over the next five years," the report noted.

However, CIOs are still willing to switch their alliances if their enterprise web 2.0 supplier is not doing the job. "This is a huge advantage but not a guaranteed success… do not assume that CIOs will not look elsewhere if your technology is not up to snuff," the research added.

How do you maximise the Value of IT to the Business? This is a question being asked by the CIO Executive Council. They have developed a IT Value Matrix that illustrates the principles and practices to essential to creating, identifying and communicating IT's value to the enterprise.

It can be downloaded at www.cioexecutivecouncil.com/it_value or below

ITValueMatrix (1953 KB)

Its "Enduring principles of IT" below are a good general guideline and tie in with our philosophy and approach at Bua Consulting:

"

1. The primary goal of IT is to align with major enterprise objectives. Every technology initiative must be tied in a provable way with business value.
2. Because all major business initiatives are dependent upon technology, the CIO must have a voice at the table at which key business decisions are made.
3. With technology at the intersection of a business, the CIO has the responsibility to understand a business's complexities, influence executive peers, and present technology strategy in terms the business can understand.
4. Technology leaders are agents of change. Transition is our stable state.
5. Communication and relationship building are equally as important to IT leadership as technology skills.
6. Successful technology leadership must strike a balance between competing forces: Short v's long term value, technology v's business focus, leading v's enabling.
7. The Cio is responsible for cultivating technology leaership at all levels of the organisation. "

 

How do you maximise the Value of IT to the Business? This is a question being asked by the CIO Executive Council. They have developed a IT Value Matrix that illustrates the principles and practices to essential to creating, identifying and communicating IT's value to the enterprise.

It can be downloaded at www.cioexecutivecouncil.com/it_value or below

ITValueMatrix (1953 KB)

Its "Enduring principles of IT" below are a good general guideline and tie in with our philosophy and approach at Bua Consulting:

"

1. The primary goal of IT is to align with major enterprise objectives. Every technology initiative must be tied in a provable way with business value.
2. Because all major business initiatives are dependent upon technology, the CIO must have a voice at the table at which key business decisions are made.
3. With technology at the intersection of a business, the CIO has the responsibility to understand a business's complexities, influence executive peers, and present technology strategy in terms the business can understand.
4. Technology leaders are agents of change. Transition is our stable state.
5. Communication and relationship building are equally as important to IT leadership as technology skills.
6. Successful technology leadership must strike a balance between competing forces: Short v's long term value, technology v's business focus, leading v's enabling.
7. The Cio is responsible for cultivating technology leaership at all levels of the organisation. "

 

How do you maximise the Value of IT to the Business? This is a question being asked by the CIO Executive Council. They have developed a IT Value Matrix that illustrates the principles and practices to essential to creating, identifying and communicating IT's value to the enterprise.

It can be downloaded at www.cioexecutivecouncil.com/it_value or below

ITValueMatrix (1953 KB)

Its "Enduring principles of IT" below are a good general guideline and tie in with our philosophy and approach at Bua Consulting:

"

1. The primary goal of IT is to align with major enterprise objectives. Every technology initiative must be tied in a provable way with business value.
2. Because all major business initiatives are dependent upon technology, the CIO must have a voice at the table at which key business decisions are made.
3. With technology at the intersection of a business, the CIO has the responsibility to understand a business's complexities, influence executive peers, and present technology strategy in terms the business can understand.
4. Technology leaders are agents of change. Transition is our stable state.
5. Communication and relationship building are equally as important to IT leadership as technology skills.
6. Successful technology leadership must strike a balance between competing forces: Short v's long term value, technology v's business focus, leading v's enabling.
7. The Cio is responsible for cultivating technology leaership at all levels of the organisation. "

Technology Evaluation is a useful website for comparing technology and systems.
The company describes itself on its website:
"TEC provides decision support systems (DSS) that enable stakeholders to objectively identify the software products that best fit their company's unique business and systems requirements, and that contribute most effectively to superior business performance. TEC has a library of knowledge bases, ranging in content from enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM), business intelligence (BI), and outsourcing, to financial, health services, radio frequency identification (RFID), and open source, all with data vetted by analysts."

Worth checking out.www.technologyevaluation.com

Technology Evaluation is a useful website for comparing technology and systems.
The company describes itself on its website:
"TEC provides decision support systems (DSS) that enable stakeholders to objectively identify the software products that best fit their company's unique business and systems requirements, and that contribute most effectively to superior business performance. TEC has a library of knowledge bases, ranging in content from enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM), business intelligence (BI), and outsourcing, to financial, health services, radio frequency identification (RFID), and open source, all with data vetted by analysts."

Worth checking out.www.technologyevaluation.com

Technology Evaluation is a useful website for comparing technology and systems.
The company describes itself on its website:
"TEC provides decision support systems (DSS) that enable stakeholders to objectively identify the software products that best fit their company's unique business and systems requirements, and that contribute most effectively to superior business performance. TEC has a library of knowledge bases, ranging in content from enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM), business intelligence (BI), and outsourcing, to financial, health services, radio frequency identification (RFID), and open source, all with data vetted by analysts."

Worth checking out.www.technologyevaluation.com

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An interview with Michael Porter on the 5 competitive forces that shape strategy and the update to his 1979 article.

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