Greater availability of social networking services, coupled with changing demographics and workstyles will lead 20 per cent of employees to use social networks as their business communications hub by 2014, according to Gartner, Inc.

Analysts said this is one of a wide range of capabilities that have emerged in communications, social Web and mobile, enabling richer interactions among people and expanding collaboration to a broader level.

'In the past, organizations supported collaboration through e-mail and highly structured applications only,' said Monica Basso, research Vice President at Gartner.

While microblogging is reshaping enterprise communications, business communications are evolving. Newer employees will enter the workforce with a predisposition to communicate via a social network, but will use e-mail in parallel ‘ optimizing the business need with the communication modality.

'The rigid distinction between e-mail and social networks will erode,' Basso said. 'E-mail will take on many social attributes, such as contact brokering, while social networks will develop richer e-mail capabilities.'

Vendors like Microsoft and IBM will add links to internal and external social networks from within e-mail clients and servers, making services such as contacts, calendars and tasks shareable across e-mail and social networks.

By 2012,Gartner said contact lists, calendars and messaging clients in any smartphone will be social-enabled applications.

Collaboration is slowly moving to the cloud and Gartner analysts expect to see steep growth for sales of premises and cloud-based social networking services. Organizations will deploy hybrid models where some services live on-premises and some are in the cloud.

Gartner predicts that the percentage of e-mail accounts on cloud services will grow to 10 per cent by year-end 2012, up seven per cent from 2009.

From a vendor’s perspective, the market is consolidating around Microsoft and Research In Motion (RIM), the two market leaders. Gartner forecasts that by 2012,RIM and Microsoft will own 80 per cent of enterprise wireless e-mail software market.

‘The reality is that mobile collaboration will increase for all categories of workers, and organizations can either take the lead, or be led by their users,’ she said.