White label social networking provider Mzinga, which officially launched at TechCrunch Boston this past November, has announced its acquisition of Prospero Technologies, another social networking company that we covered in a roundup awhile back.

Mzinga has also raised an impressive $32.5M in funding, part of which has gone towards acquiring Prospero, and part of which will be used to expand the business, which post-acquisition brings in over $30M annually from 125 enterprise customers.

This acquisition news comes on the heels of another acquisition in the space – that of ONEsite acquiring Social Platform two weeks ago. The combined activity suggests that the very fragmented and crowded white label social networking space has begun to consolidate.

I had a chance to get Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang’s thoughts on where this market is heading. He keeps a close eye on all of the white label social networking players and currently counts over 60 of them, with more joining the fray each week.

Given that the software technology provided by these companies is mostly a commodity – and that ordinary customers can’t distinguish between the many variants – Owyang predicts that many companies will combine and/or partner to form larger entities that deliver not just software but a slew of other value-add services.

These are services that can include hosting, metrics, and widgets, which make for more complete software solutions. But they can also include ongoing consultation that helps clients plan and execute more effective online community-building strategies. As Owyang puts it, successful companies “will be strategic marketing or enterprise partners who can share the goals of their clients’ business objectives.” They will also provide communities that not only integrate seamlessly into existing corporate websites but also pervade consumer social networks like Facebook and MySpace through the deployment of widgets.

In addition to intra-market acquisitions like those of Prospero and Social Platform, Owyang sees major ERP, media, and web companies getting involved through acquisitions and partnerships. The movement should be reminiscent of the consolidation that took place in the CMS industry during the late nineties.

He also predicts that the character of these services will change in time, with a movement away from generic white label solutions and towards packages that address well-defined verticals such as sports or video. The companies will also fall into camps that serve either enterprises who want to develop communities internally or clients who want to leverage communities for marketing purposes.

At our TechCrunch Boston MeetUp, a company is launching called Mzinga that brings white-label social networks to consumer research. Mzinga, which means “beehive” in Swahili, is actually the combination and rebranding of two existing companies: Knowledge Planet (Web-based corporate learning) and Shared Insights (Web communities). Right out of the gate, the company already has a healthy business with $17 million in annual revenues and 100 employees. And CEO Rick Faulk says the company is “nearly profitable.”

Mzinga lets corporations create social networks for their most ardent customers or alumni and retirees. It offers a menu of social modules that companies can add to their sites, including blogs, wikis, surveys, polls, calendars, forums, tag clouds, file uploading tools, individual profile pages, group pages, and idea-management tools with Digg-like voting. Faulk used to be the chief marketing officer at WebEx, and Mziinga already powers the community portion of its site. WebEx’s most hardcore customers can join and give feedback there about future features that WebEx should implementing.

This must be the month that social networks go corporate because last week another white-label social network launched called Networked Insights. Like Mzinga, it lets companies create a place on their sites where customers can hang out and talk about their products. But it uses semantic analysis and concept matching to extract meaning from all the chatter, and ranks conversations or comments based on how many interactions are associated with it. So a loud, whiny customer who complains a lot about a product in comments, but nobody else is joining in or linking off him, counts less than the quiet customer who only made one insightful post that spurred a torrent of other comments, links, ratings, and invitations to others to join the discussion.

Of course, being able to capture all of these discussions and mine them for meaning make them potentially more powerful than any focus group. The trick will be to get a representative sample of a company’s customers to participate, as opposed to just the most opinionated or the ones who are already brand fanatics.

Corporate social networks may not be sexy, but they could be a goldmine. Networked Insights charges $200,000 a year and up to build a social network for your brand (pricing is based on the number of interactions). Mzinga will charge $1,000 a month for its self-serve offerings and $15,000 a month for full service (or $180,000 per year), where Mzinga builds the site, then recruits, and manages the community. Faulk is finding plenty of takers for the more expensive option. “What we are finding is that companies like to write a check to make it successful,” he says, sounding a bit like someone who cannot believe his own luck.

Faulk is also taking a social approach to marketing. Mzinga’s software was used to create a site for the express purpose of crowdsourcing a book. The book, We Are Smarter Than Me, was written by 5,000 different people and published by Wharton. It was released on September 24th, and already the first print run of 15,000 is nearly sold out, says Faulk. The book is about—what else—how to use crowds to help your business.