This year’s Enterprise 2.0 conference was full of new product announcements and represented continued evolution in the value of Enterprise 2.0 solutions to businesses. The most striking realization for us was the increasing focus on Enterprise 2.0 solutions from players of all sizes, including companies as large as Cisco and CSC.

For instance, Cisco used the conference to announce an Enterprise 2.0 solution called Quad and shared that the net benefits of Cisco’s own internal use of Web 2.0 collaboration solutions were more than $1B in FY09. Cisco Quad leverages existing technologies such as Unified Communications and Telepresence and expands with business focused flip video and social software. To us, this seems like it is collaboration from the application down through the architecture.

Other items of interest:

• Andrew McAfee discussed some concepts from his book, Enterprise 2.0, and revealed that Gartner predicts that as of 2010 social software is an enterprise reality. This, of course, is backed up by McKinsey survey results on Enterprise 2.0.
• nGenera announced a human-centered enterprise collaboration solution, called Spaces, designed in collaboration with IDEO. Spaces includes a user configurable interface and plug-in architecture, allowing data access via interactive mini applications. This strikes us as collaboration from the middleware/web services layer out.

We’re already wondering what features Enteprise 3.0 will have. If you’d like to set up a market to test your ideas on that front, let us know.

In September 2009, McKinsey & Company revealed the results of a global survey on trends in Web 2.0 in the enterprise. Prediction markets were included among 12 core Enterprise 2.0 technologies. Adoption within global corporations has risen from less than 1% in 2007 to 8% in 2009.

We were delighted that prediction markets were identified as a key Web 2.0 technology. However:

Respondents who report that Web technologies have strengthened their companies’ links to customers also cite blogs and social networks as important. Both allow companies to distribute product information more readily and, perhaps more critically, they invite customer feedback and even participation in the creation of products.

Similarly, among those capturing benefits in their dealings with suppliers and partners, the tools of choice again are blogs, social networks, and video sharing. While respondents tell us that tapping expert knowledge from outside is their top priority, few report deploying prediction markets to harvest collective insights from these external networks.

This disconnect is puzzling to us. Prediction markets offer an efficiency of consensus that is not delivered by enterprise social networks. Platforms like Foresight offer effective leading business indicators that convert straight to actionable decisions.

Respondents, have you considered requesting additional information from us so that we can help you harvest collective insights from your external networks?