The majority of senior managers at European organisations are failing to invest in web 2.0 technologies owing to a lack of understanding of the business benefits, new research claims.

A poll of respondents from seven European countries by BEA Systems found that nearly a quarter of companies are also concerned about how to regulate the content, and 20 per cent expressed concerns regarding security.

Around 40 per cent of organisations that have embraced web 2.0 technologies reckon that the major business benefit is to improve interaction with customers.

Enterprise social computing platforms are seen by many as way for organisations to change they way they interact with customers, improve service levels and increase sales.

The other key reasons cited for deploying web 2.0 are improved employee collaboration (cited by 31 per cent of respondents) and the opportunity to create an easier interface with partners and suppliers (cited by 28 per cent).

"Emerging web 2.0 social software such as blogs, wikis, social networks and mashups are being adapted for business use with the potential for far-reaching productivity gains for every knowledge worker including marketing, sales, communications, R&D and human resources," said Martin Percival, EMEA senior technology evangelist at BEA Systems.

"Using social computing workers can tap these service-enabled assets directly to help complete their business tasks, turning service oriented architectures into even more valuable participation oriented architectures."

The research also found that the demand for mashups, sites that combine content from several sources (usually configurable by the user) into an integrated page, is set to treble from its current level of six per cent of organisations to 18 per cent within the next 18 months.