In late 2007 I took a long look into my crystal ball and wrote out nine specific predictions for the enterprise Web 2.0 market for the coming year. Well, its that time of year again — I will be writing up another series of predictions in a Forrester report over the next 2 weeks — and it felt like a good chance to look back at my 2008 predictions and see how I did.

So, in that vein, lets start with the easy ones: Trial deployments in 2007 will deepen in 2008

Last year I wrote “Forrester has seen the adoption of enterprise Web 2.0 tools consistently follow a tried-and-true pattern: technology investigation, experimentation, roll-out to small groups or teams, and finally widespread adoption. The vast majority of deployments followed this pattern in 2007, but as of yet very few have hit the point of pan-enterprise adoption. While we don’t expect every deployment to balloon to its full potential in 2008, we expect that enough will grow to provide solid revenue growth within existing installed bases.”

So how did I do? Well this was an easy one: Yes, deployments in 2007 deepened in 2008. Unfortunately our Business Data Services data on the topic is not yet out of field — be on the lookout for that data in a few weeks here and in a full blown report — but the anecdotal evidence makes this one a foregone conclusion. Even despite the soft economy for most of the second half of 2008 I consistently dealt with firms that were expanding their deployments, either to more employees, more customers, or more products and features.

In other words, Web 2.0 is here to stay. In late 2007 I actually had discussions with CIOs, CMOs, and others where this was not yet a foregone conclusion — hence the prediction. In 2008 I can’t remember the last time I had that discussion.

Score: Oliver – 1, Market – 0

Up next, IT departments will take their heads out of the sand and embrace Web 2.0 technologies. 

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