“The question is how you sell this to the enterprise,” says Irwin Lazar, principal analyst and program director for convergence and collaboration at Nemertes Research. “The enterprise manager will say, how do I manage this, how can I control it, how can I cost justify the implementation, how do I support it and what are the training issues.”

Lazar says the model around Web 2.0 tools is decentralization -- the tools get pushed out to users, who then figure out how to use them -- as opposed to the way software has been deployed for years as a big, feature-laden package that required user training.

“You have a younger generation that has grown up on MySpace and social bookmarking, and an older generation that really does not have any concept of how these tools work,” Lazar says.

He agrees with IBM’s take on the future of collaboration, but he says the challenge will be educating customers on the business benefits.