Well well. So the enterprise gets Web2.0, eh?
At a recent event – “Inside the Bubble“, organised by Banner – I shared some bar-stool space Sam Sethi, of TechCrunch UK who opined that the ‘next big thing’ would be enterprise software catching the Web2.0 bug.
I nodded, but I didn’t really agree. Having worked in past lives with the painful development cycles of the Oracles of the world I doubted that they’d get their act together quickly enough or, more pertinently, find “openness” a compelling business case.
Interesting therefore to hear of the appropriation of the language of Web2.0 at least via InternetNews.
So, what’s this doohicky of Oracle’s then?
“First, it’s a complete set of standards-based middleware, which gives you all the capability you need to use a service-oriented architecture,”
said Thomas Kurian, senior vice president with Oracle .
The reporting voices Kurian’s desire to free the enterprise from waiting on the IT department and suchlike and it all sounds lovely. However, I’m always warying of whiz-bang offerings that site within a vendor’s development environment – we’ve been hear before: flash, .net, Websphere etc. That said, though, once an enterprise is committed to Oracle then at least there’s now some hope of flexibility for the employees – oh, and some improvement over the standard Oracle “self service” templates? Could that be true? Be still, my beating heart…
Whether hype or not, however difficult implementation may be, it’s a no-brainer that information within an organisation needs to be free, flexible and relevant. Whether we call that Web2.0, common sense or a dream, it’s as important today as it was when first promised some 20 years ago in the Relational Database of Everything on Your PC days.