Firms ready to adopt enterprise 2.0 tools

IDC survey finds support for new enterprise tools, but also confusion about their benefits

According to a survey carried out by analysts IDC, IT managers across Europe are ready and willing to embrace new enterprise technologies such as IT convergence, and green IT. However, much confusion about the growing technologies still exists.

Currently very few firms have embraced so-called enterprise 2.0 technologies, on average on a scale of one-ten, respondents rated their adoption at just 3.81. However, when asked how this was expected to change over the coming months that figure doubled, as managers predicted a growth in their use of the tools including web-based voice and data, unified messaging, and social networking tools.

The ability to improve internal communications was cited by fifty per cent of respondents as a key driver for adopting web 2.0 and social networking tools. The tools should also improve communications with customers, according to 31 per cent of respondents, while 20 per cent added that it would help them meet compliance legislation.

Although a quarter of managers said that it was too early to say how successful these technologies had been, but others, some 37 per cent, said that they had already achieved all of their aims through the use of the new tools, and were seeing good return on investment.

Green IT, an ever-increasingly important purchasing consideration, has mixed responses from managers. Thirty per cent say that being green it is the responsibility of IT suppliers, twenty four per cent see the use of such items as being morally important, while twenty per cent admitted to being indifferent about the issue.

Perhaps the cause of these mixed responses is the revelation that few managers are even aware of the green options available to them. Sixty eight per cent of IT managers said that they had little or no knowledge of their suppliers' credentials.

The survey, which polled some 1200 managers from across Europe, will be published at IDC's European ICT forum, which starts 10 September in Berlin.