Social technologies, commonly called Web 2.0, were originally used to describe consumer technologies that enable groups to organize and share information and media. But enterprises quickly caught on to the value of these easy-to-use tools for capturing and sharing ad hoc information that may otherwise not be documented. This is having a profound impact on the tools that enterprise IT customers need to implement and support in order to meet the demands and needs of their users, such as collaboratively working across regions, knowledge capture, and community and brand building outside the firewall.

While this creates a new challenge for IT shops, it also represents a great opportunity to enhance their ability to support better communication within their enterprise and with other entities. Many tools and applications are available, and ample opportunity exists to use outsourcing as well. On the hardware side, IT can leverage existing infrastructure and/or outsource to obtain computing resources. Newer hardware technologies utilizing virtualization and a dense form factor with proven best practices from existing Web deployments will drive many of the new hardware purchases for these types of environments.