Enterprises are facing increasing challenges as the global marketplace becomes ever more competitive. They must become dynamic to improve the speed with which their networks connect people to people, people to processes, and people to knowledge. To achieve this dynamism, they must harness the power of unified communications (UC) and collaboration tools to empower employees, whoever they are, contact center agent or knowledge worker, in whatever role, team worker, manager, or senior executive, and wherever they’re working, at home, on the road, or in the office. But it is not sufficient just to speed up communication. It is also vital to improve the quality of collaboration, which means being able to connect to the right people and the right information at the right time. Enterprises are increasingly looking to Web 2.0 tools to achieve this improvement.

The enterprise Web 2.0 market, which includes the deployment of tools like blogs, wikis, and social networking within the enterprise, was a growing force in enterprise software in 2007. Although still immature, this market will continue to gain importance in 2008 as increasing numbers of firms look to enterprise Web 2.0 tools to help their staff access the right people and information. In recent research carried out by Forrester, 24% of firms surveyed said Web 2.0 tools were a priority for 2008. The technical challenge facing enterprises today is how to build a flexible and secure networking environment that implements UC, collaboration, and Web 2.0 tools on both fixed and mobile devices.