Two Doors to Enterprise Web 2.0 Adoption

Open source technologies like Spring and WaveMaker build unstoppable momentum

Apr. 21, 2008 05:00 AM

Chris Keene's "Keene View" Blog

Ben Worthen of the Wall Street Journal recently posted an entry about Web 2.0 adoption. He cited a Forrester survey that concluded Enterprise Web 2.0 solutions would gain broad adoption in 2008 despite clear CIO resistance to the siren call of blogs and wikis.

As a strong proponent of Web 2.0 in the enterprise, we at WaveMaker want very much to see a rapid adoption of these technologies at the corporate level. On the other hand, wishing won't make it so - the grab-bag of technologies and ideas that constitute Web 2.0 are bound to confuse the IT community.

There are two possible observations here:

Damn the data, full speed ahead. Just like drug companies that sink a great deal of money into disappointing clinical trials that they then attempt to spin into medical break-throughs, analyst firms like Forrester won’t sell many copies of a Web 2.0 report that concludes Web 2.0 ain’t happening in the enterprise anytime soon. Thus there is a strong incentive for the report authors to refute their own data in the survey summary.
Web 2.0 is being pulled into the enterprise, not pushed. Since the PC, all client-side technologies have been pulled into the enterprise by business users, not pushed into the enterprise by central IT. The main themes of Web 2.0 – rich interface, collaboration and user-driven content – have more to do with how users interact with their computers than with computer infrastructure.

At my WebGuild panel recently, Rod Johnson of SpringSource observed that open source technologies like Spring and WaveMaker build unstoppable momentum within the IT organization by solving fundamental problems that much bigger players either cannot or will not solve.

For Spring, the tailwind came the intractable complexity of the EJB standard that left developers desperate for a simpler, more lightweight java application server. For WaveMaker, the tailwind comes from the complete dearth of visual tools for web development that would enable MS Access, Lotus Notes and PowerBuilder developers to come out of the client/server dark ages and build the kinds of web-based applications that their end users want.

Published Apr. 21, 2008— Reads 17,353
Copyright © 2008 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.

▪ ActiveGrid Re-brands as WaveMaker

▪ WaveMaker Releases Enterprise Web 2.0 Product Line

▪ Who Will Become the PowerBuilder of the Web 2.0 Set?

▪ Two Doors to Enterprise Web 2.0 Adoption

▪ Viewpoint: Time for Open Source Software Vendors to Think Beyond Free

About Christopher Keene
Christopher Keene is Chairman and CEO of WaveMaker (formerly ActiveGrid). Chris was the founder, in 1991, of Persistence Software, a San Mateo, CA-based company that created a new approach for managing data in high-transaction banking and communications systems. Persistence Software investors included Cisco, Intel, Reuters and Sun Microsystems. The company went public in 1999 on the NASDAQ exchange and was sold in 2004 to Progress software.After leaving Persistence Software in 2005, Chris spent a year in France as chairman of Reportive Software, a Paris-based maker of business-intelligence tools, and as an adjunct professor and entrepreneur-in-residence at INSEAD, a leading graduate business school.

Enterprise Open Source Magazine Latest Stories . . .

So You Want to Use Open Source Cloud for Your Web Application

By Puneet Sangal

Before embarking on using open source cloud technology for your web property, a basic understanding of cloud, as it’s used in the industry, is essential. While there might be exceptions, here are the definitions. A software application delivered on the web instead of installing standa...

Cloud Expo NY: Predictive Analytics Leads to Successful Recommendations

By Elizabeth White

Businesses today generate billions of events or 100s of TBs of data in a month. These data contain valuable insights into customer behavior, key trends, buying patterns, etc. If these are successfully mined, they can lead to successful decision-making to maximize revenue and traffic fo...

GridGain and Grid Dynamics Enable eCommerce and Big Data Solutions

By Thomas Krafft

Grid Dynamics, an eCommerce technology solutions company, and GridGain Systems, makers of an open source in-memory platform for Big Data processing, on Wednesday announced the expansion of their partnership which began in 2008. Grid Dynamics provides personalization and big data solut...

Cloud Expo New York: The Dirty Little Secret of Private Cloud – Running It

By Liz McMillan

Private clouds solve many problems for enterprises and bring unique operational challenges along with them. There are dozens of companies of all sizes that will build you a private cloud and turn over the keys – then what? Trying to convert a traditional enterprise IT operations team t...

Software Defined Networking – A Paradigm Shift

By Kapil Raval

The networking industry has gone through different waves over last 30+ years. In the ’80s, the first wave was all about connecting and sharing; how to connect a computer to other peripheral devices and other computers. There were many players who developed technology and services to ad...

Cloud Expo New York: Private PaaS for the Enterprise and Beyond

By Liz McMillan

If your organization already uses virtualized infrastructure, you are well on your way to providing IT as a Service. But as businesses demand faster results in today’s competitive market, organizations look to gain more benefits from cloud computing than just virtualized infrastructure...