Will Enteprise 2.0 Change the Communications of SMEs?

Gary Kim from TMC IP Telephony wonders if the rise of Enterprise 2.0 collaboration tools will change the communications requirements of SMEs.  While he gets bottom-up and top-down backward to me (things emerge into the enterprise from the bottom-up, and please don't call enterprise to SME to edu to consumer trickling down).  Its interesting to consider if there will be new problems or opportunities down the stack.

So maybe most providers of communications services to SMEs will not see a direct change in requirements as Web 2.0 changes the ways enterprises communicate, which in turn affects the way smaller businesses communicate.

 

In the end, perhaps the communications requirements simply are as simple as faster broadband with better quality of service; more mobile broadband and greater reliance on Web access.

 

In that case, use of social media tools will not be directly translate into materially different voice and data needs in the SME space, in a qualitative sense, with one salient exception. Quality of service mechanisms, more-precise class of service support and application-specific priorities will be more important.

 

Initially though, social media might change demand in a quantitative sense. People will simply be asking for "more."

I'd disagree about the exception, as the World of Ends doesn't stop at the enterprise firewall.  We're coming in at port 80, and while there are app specific priorities, quantity will matter over quality in this sense, and don't bother incurring the cost of throttling quantity at a granular level..  So far, the virtue is lightweight and web native. 

But Gary also got me thinking that there should be another class of Enterprise 2.0 tools in the future that will have different voice and data requirements.  Think Web 2.0 built on Asterix instead of Apache.  So far we have had consumer innovation in Skype, Jaxtr and Jott, innovations like Angel.com for IVR for business, but can someone point me to group-centric models of VoIP Social Software? 

Or are we going to keep freeloading off of FreeConference.com without re-defining group voice for the consumers or business?  I see a lot more happening around Web and Enterprise video than I hear otherwise.