I've talked before about my take on Web 2.0 and how it is more than just all the hype about collaboration and/or the Social web. The true power of what the world is about to witness lies in the integration and composition of web services exposed through a service orientated architecture (SOA) to go beyond simple TCO issues, but rather to open an organization to new markets and opportunities that would have never have been possible without. See my short post on IaaS as I like to call it. Enterprise 2.0 to me is about the ability to push control of the systems out to the client. These new enterprise applications add their value at the client tier and AJAX does this by being an enabling technology.
The big picture is Web 2.0: We are seeing the freeing up of the content within businesses (SOA) like we have seen the freeing up of content on the web in general. Currently, for those who haven't embraced SOA, information is locked in the enterprise and cant always share it.
Now with the next generation web/ web 2.0 there are new ways people are generating content and filtering the content. The best way to do this is letting lots of people contribute and then selecting the relevance of this content differently by tagging or the like. This whole approach is just now gaining acceptance, or even notice, in enterprises and will be ever increasingly relevant within these organizations. AJAX is a technology that has helped energize the interest from a technology standpoint for it is the consuming side of the services that are freed up through SOA from the silos.
So now you have all these services trapped inside a monolithic application with a ton of functionality within a business that is only available to specific chunks tied to the mono architecture. There is yet to be a true agnostic, lightweight platform to consume and integrate these services. There are many small vendors out there that claim to "build composite apps" but after researching about a dozen of them I inevitably always am disappointed the deeper I dig. Most confine you to an ecosystem or a proprietary standard that is not interoperable. Others claim the ability to consume and build composite apps but really when you question them all they are doing is combining "composite presentations of various data sources." Not what I consider an application. So be weary.
So who is going to usher in this Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 or now even SaaS 2.0?
Everybody on the server side is focused on freeing up the functionality out of these monolithic applications so you can get business grain services. They can now be consumed by light-weight client models thanks to AJAX. This is why the integration layer I have talked about will be driven by those who are experienced with the client side models. The back-end can do their part, expose the services which they have or are doing so, but they aren't going to be able to create what is truly needed for the consumption because this is not there expertise. The services are moving out farther, the power of the apps as well, to the client so it only makes sense that the driver of this integration will be through the client tier experts and more specifically, those skilled in AJAX. Check out the JackBe's management talks at events like JavaOne and RealWorld AJAX. They have this vision in mind and are working towards it.
Web 2.0 SaaS 2.0 Enterprise 2.o Next Generation Platform IaaS Integration as a Service Composite Applications AJAX SOA Social Collaboration Mashup
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