Social Enterprise Apps is a $6,4 billion market in 2016 (says Forrester Research)

Two pieces of information from last weeks news feeds point towards some accelerated change in the social enterprise applications market.

For once, it was the "company bans internal email to increase productivity" flurry, which hit mainstream media and saw commuters all over Europe nodding in excitement while reading their smartphones in the subway. 
On a substantially more earnest level it was Forrester Researchs new report "Social Enterprise Apps Redefine Collaboration", which forecasts the market for social enterprise applications and related services to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 61 percent, to become a $6.4 billion market in 2016, compared with $600 million last year. 
Forrester argues, that enterprise social collaboration tools, adopting Facebook or Twitter like capabilities adjusted for workforce needs, will see substantial growth in the coming years, surpassing the demand for more traditional communications and collaboration products. According to the report, only 12 percent of information workers have access to enterprise social collaboration software, and only 8 percent of them use it at least once a week, although enterprise social collaboration products have been around for about five years. 
It further states, that tools like email, IM, VoIP, UC&C, online meetings and videoconferencing have not yet met the expectations  for increased employee productivity and will see declining demand by 2014, because, unlike enterprise social software, they don't help employees discover peers outside of their work groups with expertise they need to tap. 
To overcome what analyst Henry Dewing judges to be an "adoption malaise", a new generation of social enterprise apps will finally "deliver the productivity businesses desire by systematically grouping and rating people, information, and processes required to answer business needs".
No doubt, these claims chime well with our attempts to build out Refinder as a next-generation collaborative business tool.