Do you need a quick $400,000 (250,000 euro) in order to afford the summer on the Grand Tour of the continent?

Do you know a lot about Enterprise 2.0 (E2) and happen to have a lot of statistically significant primary supply-side research about E2 hanging around?

Then write to the Director General, Information Society and Media Directorate, European Commission, Brussels and tell him you would like to bid on the European Union (EU) research contract, Study on Enterprise 2.0' (SMART 2009/0021), details of which were released around May 25. The downside is that the your bid is not due until early August. Because Europe shuts down in August, no one will open and read the bid until September, so you'll have to save the 250,000 euro until next summer (or you could spend the winter on the Costa del Sol doing the "analysis.")

Here's what the Eurocrats want to know:

• Because "Enterprise software for content, collaboration and communication based on the Internet, which can be used for both intra- and inter-organisational communication, is expected to see a worldwide growth rate of 13.9% in 2006-2011..." and
• Because "Enterprise 2.0 covers traditionally a system of Web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended Enterprise (for the purpose of this study this could also entail virtual worlds)..." and
• Because "the market is still significantly U.S. dominated (looking at the biggest 99 companies supplying the Web 2.0
  software market, U.S. presence is about 2/3)..."
• Then "Obviously, a fast growing market for enterprise 2.0 applications offers a great potential for European enterprise 2.0 companies."

Translated from Eurocratese, that means Europe is still trying to build a nativist software industry and cannot accept the fact that software has no nationality.  Having failed so far this decade at building a Euro-centric software movement based on Open Source and Open Standards, the EU bureaucracy has moved on to the next buzzword, Enterprise 2.0.

But how can E2 be anything one would associate with the word "traditionally," given that is only a few-year-old buzzword?  Not to mention that it is just a buzzword and therefore simply a figuratively orthogonal look at the IT market as we know it.

Furthermore the Eurocrats who consider a five-year 13.9 percent compournd annual growth rate (CAGR) to be an important opportunity are wasting their taxpayer's money. (Note that all statistics in the bulleted items are from the EU tender offer and I do not know their source or even believe them.) I don't know the source of that CAGR or how the researcher defined the E2 market, but if the EU is looking for a fast growing IT market to wire for their home boys via regulation and legislation, meaningful emerging IT markets double every year or every other year, not every five-six years.

Not to mention the fact that if someone was measuring a CAGR for E2 back in 2006, this ship has sailed.

Attention Mr. Information Society and Media Director General: the leading E2 (if that means "enterprise software for content, collaboration and communication based on the Internet") supplier in Europe is Microsoft. Google, IBM, Oracle and the EU-based SAP are right in there with Microsoft, and all of them employ tens of thousands in the EU. And Dassault, Datev, Misys, Sage, Siemens, Software Ag and Unit4 Agresso are doing well in E2, also if that makes you feel better.

Invoice for 250,000 euro to follow.

I assume the 250,000 euro amount is the top amount you are allowed to bid, but I am not sure how the EU procurement process works.

(Thanks to Jose at Alianzo for pointing me to this information. Jose, are you the same Jose whose great commentary I preserved for posterityon IT Business  Edge because VentureBeat deleted the news story about Microsoft's plans vis a vis Windows 7 and IE8?)