After more than five years of promise as the holy grail of content syndication, RSS/ATOM data formats are gaining use in mainstream commercial websites. Greg Reinacker, the CTO/Founder of RSS giant Newsgator sees that:

RSS in the enterprise is not about “reading feeds.” It’s more about enterprise integration, search, feedback, etc. It’s about extending the value of existing systems, and leveraging efficient content distribution and tracking into new applications (e.g. social computing) as well as existing applications (e.g. portal enhancement).

What he describes above is exactly what I am seeing in conservative customer-facing enterprises; RSS being used to quickly and easily present content that the customer values outside of the slow IT-driven development cycle.