Thoughts on Palo Alto Network's Report, "An Analysis of End User Application Trends in the Enterprise"

Recently Palo Alto Networks released the fall edition of their Application Usage and Risk Report: An Analysis of End User Application Trends in the Enterprise. There are definitely some interesting findings within the report, and I wanted to highlight some of the more noteworthy ones from the perspective of NewsGator, particularly NewsGator Social Sites for Microsoft SharePoint.

For instance the report finds that 91% of organizations they polled were using SharePoint, up dramatically from the 37% of organizations who reported using SharePoint in the spring 2009 version of their report.  (In addition, their analysis shows a "staggering" 48% year-over-year growth in the market share of SharePoint.) 

In addition, the study confirms the observation that employees are increasingly becoming (more) active contributors.  In particular, the analysis shows that employees were "significantly more active in their blogging and posting activity" compared to the spring 2009 analysis. They also found significant increases in "total session activity" and "total bandwidth consumed" by these contribution activities. Their conclusion, which is one we fully agree with at NewsGator, is that "the dramatic increase in blog/wiki activity fully supports one of the key tenets around Enterprise 2.0 applications, which is that users, consumers and contributors are often the same person." 

Another finding in the report is that "SharePoint is being deployed by management, in a top down manner" despite the fact that Gartner reports that some 30% of SharePoint deployments are actually “rogue, meaning that end-users or business groups saw a need to be more collaborative and deployed a tool that they had at their disposal."  

What's most interesting, and perhaps important, is that, according to Palo Alto Networks, two recent surveys -- the McKinsey Report on Web 2.0 & a report by AIIM -- show that respondents are reporting measurable benefits from the use of these types of collaboration tools.  More specifically, McKinsey found that 69% of companies surveyed have noted enhanced "innovation, more effective marketing, more rapid access to information, lower costs and higher revenues" and that respondents "saw an increased ability to share ideas, more rapid access to knowledge experts, and a reduction in costs for travel operations and communications."  Likewise, AIIM's report showed that more than 50% of those surveyed "consider the use of Enterprise 2.0 applications to be important or very important" citing the three most important benefits being "knowledge sharing," "information gathering," and "improved efficiency/speed" at work. 

No doubt, the results on Palo Alto Network's fall 2009 report, as well as two other reports they cite, show that Enterprise 2.0 collaboration tools are not only seeing a dramatic increase in usage since earlier in the year, but that companies and employees are seeing concrete and wide-ranging benefits from the use of these tools.  All of this confirms that the social networking and collaboration tools in NewsGator Social Sites can bring measurable benefits to the day-to-day operations of enterprises.  

You can access the full Palo Alto Networks fall report here.