Among the growth drivers are a push to add social collaboration capabilities to other enterprise applications, and demand from employees for software that resembles the consumer applications they use outside work.

Some factors will work to slow down the momentum, however, including concerns about return-on-investment, security, regulatory compliance and intellectual property protection, as well as the involvement needed from IT departments to deploy and integrate the software, according to IDC.

In a different study, "Worldwide Enterprise Social Software 2011 Vendor Shares," IDC ranked vendors by their 2011 revenue. The list was led by IBM with $105.4 million, followed by Jive Software ($65.3 million), Communispace ($60 million), Telligent ($42.7 million) and Socialtext ($34.5 million). Rounding out the top 10 were Mzinga, Lithium, Yammer, NewsGator and VMware.

In a sign of the growing importance of this type of software, Microsoft is in talks to acquire Yammer for about US$1 billion, according to a Bloomberg article last week. Microsoft, which lags in this area, could instantly boost the social features in its collaboration products, particularly SharePoint, if it bought Yammer.

Google officials have also been saying for months that they are developing a workplace version of the company's Google+ social networking site, which could give Google Apps an enterprise social component it currently lacks.