Faster moving vendors that have a delivery mechanism that allows keeping up with consumer trends have had the advantage so far, he said. SharePoint's biggest functional shortfall has been its lack of native Twitter-like microblogging and Facebook-like activity streams, Koplowitz said.

"We’ll assume they address that in the next version. The real question is how quickly they will be able to build and deliver the next great thing. For some customers, the ability to stay on the cutting edge is a significant driver, for others it will be less critical," he said.Larger vendors like Microsoft can offer ESN features as part of broader, integrated collaboration platform, but ESN vendors like Jive Software and Yammer are demonstrating that there is "significant market appetite for an independent pure-play solution in this space," he said."Microsoft is clearly committed to the space and with knowledge worker solutions that usually translates to a lot of market share for them. That said, many customers are looking for solutions that are faster moving or more vendor agnostic so there will be plenty of room for others to be successful for the foreseeable future," Koplowitz said.

Microsoft recently hired Harris Interactive to conduct a study about ESN usage and adoption. Harris Interactive polled 202 IT and business decision makers in U.S. companies with at least 1,000 employees, where an ESN is either already in place or in the process of being developed.

The Microsoft-sponsored survey found that 59 percent of respondents consider it "absolutely essential" or "extremely important" for ESN software to be integrated with their companies' existing infrastructure.

The study also found that security tops the list of ESN-related concerns, followed by integration with existing systems (66 percent), compliance (53 percent), governance (44 percent) and the ability to build custom applications for social networking (27 percent).