According to research by Frost & Sullivan, the growing importance of smart devices in the enterprise is the driving factor of social collaboration adoption in Australia.
Frost & Sullivan Australian Social Collaboration Market 2012 report revealed that social collaboration is expected to rise over the next few years in Australia.
Frost & Sullivan ANZ ICT Practice head of research Audrey William said that the proliferation of smart devices is helping to create a significant change in the way employees access corporate applications.
"Additionally we will start seeing more of the Unified Communications solutions incorporate social media and collaboration as part of its solution" William said.
Big data, which is expected to add a new aspect to social collaboration, is predicted to be very powerful in the future for firms to understand the deeper aspects of social collaboration in the cloud, via data on mobile devices, websites and social platforms.
The importance of social analytics is also expected to rise, as it provides organisations with enhanced intelligence and measurements on social collaboration activities.
"That will be the foundation of helping them benchmark themselves against competition as well as deepen their understanding of what is currently lacking as part of their overall product, marketing or customer service strategy," William said.
"It is still early days and this area will evolve over time and there will be huge opportunity for vendors in the analytics and business intelligence space to develop social collaboration analytical tools."
Social collaboration is also effect and shift other markets beyond enterprise collaboration, the research firm revealed.
Frost & Sullivan ANZ ICT Practice industry analyst Anand Balasubramanian said that e-mail will continue to be relevant, however email will be more social in nature in the coming years.
"We are already witnessing that sort of innovation from vendors in the marketplace," Balasubramanian said.
