I got an interested email a few days ago from Prashanth Rai.

He asked me if I thought the "RSS / Reader/ Aggregator etc is becoming the key part of or center of the Enterprise 2.0 Universe?"

This is what I told him:

I think that RSS aggregators will be a critical part of any future Web Office solution.

However, in the short term, most companies first need to invest in tools to create RSS content within the enterprise. So far, the only large companies I have heard what make significant use of internal blogs are SAP, Google, Yahoo!, Sun and Microsoft. There are many other big firms that have 2 or 3 blogs set up by their senior executives. But 2 or 3 blogs do not require RSS readers. And 2 or 3 blogs by senior executives entirely misses the real value of blogs as tool for enhancing grass-roots level internal communication.

To date, there are very few vendors selling enterprise class blogging systems designed to create thousands of internal blogs. If a company has thousands of employees and thousands of customers, you and easily imagine a scenario where the company requires thousands of blogs; one for each employee and one for each major customer. Once the company has all those blogs running, RSS aggregators will be invaluable. However, today, the technology to handle that administer that many blogs is not generally available. Companies like SixApart, Automattic and Blogtronix are working on it.

But, the market is still in its earliest stages. There are significant issues to work out, including how to efficiently administer such a large system, and how to deal with business requirements for audit trails, access control and integration into back end legacy systems through SOA powered mash-ups.