Web 2.0 – the constellation of technologies and methodologies that cover everything from collaboration to clouds to mashups – has been the darling of the consumer Web for several years now. With a few keystrokes, users can tap into huge global communities, mine rich veins of online data, and assemble their own lightweight applications.
While all this excitement has whirled around the consumer Web, the impact on enterprises – and how enterprise architects should view Web 2.0 – has not been clear. Until now. It appears enterprises are getting serious about Web 2.0, and the time has come for enterprise architects to look at ways for building Web 2.0 approaches into short and long-range design.
A recent survey of 406 executives from the Economist Intelligence Unit confirms that Web 2.0 has become a key strategy in many of the world’s largest corporations. The survey found that 79% of respondents see the collaborative Web as a way to boost revenues and cut costs.
There are a number of advantages organization can realize through Web 2.0 approaches: as an alternative to more costly proprietary systems; to better reach and interact with customers and markets; to shield end users from complexity; and to enable users to gain more control over their own applications and data.
The most likely way Web 2.0 will be seen in enterprise architectural planning is through strategies often referred to as “Web as a Platform,” “Enterprise Web 2.0,” or “Web Oriented Architecture (WOA).”
Dion Hinchcliffe, who has documented the rise of the Enterprise Web for the past few years, expects to see even greater enterprise adoption of Web 2.0 approaches in this year’s rough-and-tumble economy. “In reality, once enterprises make the decision to move to platforms for wikis, enterprise mashups, cloud services, SaaS enterprise apps, and so on, they may find the one-stop shop of pre-integrated solutions from entrenched software providers more than they can resist,” Dion writes. “For budgetary reasons as
well as competitive advantage, all things 2.0 are finally becoming mainstream as the applications themselves become truly enterprise class.”
Dion says WOA represents a new force that combines the enterprise savvy of SOA with the distributed nature of Web 2.0. “Given current events in technology and business, SOA will not survive in its present form, and 2009 will be a deeply transformative year for it. Expect mashup technologies to be front and center with this transformation as well as the closely related WOA as Web 2.0/SOA convergence continues unabated.”
How should enterprise architects harness this new force sweeping through their organizations? Here are the ways Web 2.0 is transforming organizations:
From “industrialization” to collaboration. The rise of Web 2.0 represents a sea change for enterprise architects. “Enterprise IT has always looked to improve efficiency through industrialization and automation,” says Sam Lowe. “This has often meant standardization, centralization, and consolidation were used as methods of enabling this.” These structured approaches extended to all enterprise data management approaches, including data modeling, data warehousing, and business intelligence.
Web 2.0 loosens up this emphasis on centralization and industrialization, Lowe says. “Rather than automation and industrialization, its key objectives have tended to be more like access and collaboration,” he says. “This difference has enabled interesting emergent innovations in the Internet that enterprise IT has been able to absorb back into its own practices.”
From costly proprietary solutions to pay-as-you-go approaches. Dion Hinchcliffe observes that the power of Web 2.0 is also proving to be a valuable tool for weathering the financial storm. He recommends looking at cloud or Software-as-a-Service solutions, which, in some cases, can save up to 40% in licensing and maintenance costs.
As a means to capture institutional knowledge. In addition, Dion adds, “enabling open, persistent, freeform collaboration amongst far-flung workers allows vast amounts of institutional knowledge to pour out into visible places on the network where that information can then be studied, reused, and learned by others including (perhaps especially) new workers down the road.”
As a new, faster method of application development. Dion also observes that Web 2.0 approaches help reduce application development and integration time and expenditures. Mashups, for example, enable lightweight integration and composite application development.
From internal data management to large-scale global integration. There is even a bigger story on the Web. “Over the last few years, the Web community has developed highly innovative new models for creating and integrating software together to cope with the scale and complexity of the online world, with which most enterprises pale in comparison,” Dion says.
An example of the movement to global-scale cloud computing and data integration is Informatica’s family of On Demand data integration services, which automate the steps required to ensure that on-premise data is kept consistent and current with data in cloud-based offerings, and enables companies to synchronize data between their on-premise applications and their on-demand cloud applications – from within the cloud.
