December 19th, 2005
More Web 2.0 sizzle vs. enterprise steak
In my last post, I took note of Dion Hinchcliffe’s earnest effort to connect the dots between Web 2.0 and enterprise computing. Now, Dave Linthicum has taken a stab at evangelizing Web 2.0 for the enterprise. "We are moving to a day when most of our enterprise applications may be delivered as services, and thus providing a more economical way to approach information technology management with businesses going forward…. In essence we’re moving to Web 2.0 where service delivery over the Internet will be added to information delivery as the key strategic value of the Internet to business."
Linthicum notes there are some technical issues that still need to be addressed before this convergence happens full force, including semantic and metadata management, transformation and routing, and governance across all systems, among other things.
The links between Web 2.0 and enterprise SOA are still vague and uncertain, as I noted in the last post. Web 2.0 is a lot of sizzle, and we don’t know how much meat is actually in there for enterprises.
But, that’s the way it was when PCs first came on the market, as well as the World Wide Web. The hype can get really, really, really annoying, and vendors’ efforts to jump on the latest bandwagon can be utterly transparent and sometimes laughable. But, we need the sizzly stuff not only to make technology sexy and exciting, but also to bring in fresh thinking, and open up people’s minds to new innovations. (Try talking up job schedulers or redundant disk arrays at your next social event.)
In fact, there is one aspect of Web 2.0 that some vendors are already exploring for enterprise reach — RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, which up to now has been up to now the format for capturing blogs and news. Reactivity, for one, has been doing some work and thinking to apply RSS to intra-enterprise messaging between systems.
Potentially, RSS feeds can serve as a messaging tool for enterprise data and information. Andrew Nash, CTO of Reactivity, has pointed out that the main issue holding back enterprise deployment of RSS is that "it didn’t have the requisite privacy, security and identification mechanisms” to let enterprises feel confident about delivering sensitive data over that kind of protocol. However, things are evolving quickly in this regard. Stay tuned.
Joe McKendrick is an author and consultant with deep knowledge and insights regarding trends and developments in the technology industry. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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