The Keene View on Web 2.0, Ajax and SaaS

Last week, Wavemaker Software and BSG Alliance hosted a CIO panel titled, CIO survival guide for Web 2.0. The CIO panel included Jim Sutter, former CIO of Xerox, Lila Tretikov, CIO of SugarCRM, Max Rayner, CIO of TravelZoo, Steve Douty, President of BSG Applications and former CIO of Hotmail, Larry Singer, former CIO of the state of Georgia and Andrew Aitken, CEO of the Olliance Group.

Today, Matt Asay posted a great summary of the WaveMaker/BSG CIO panel on his CNet Open Road blog, under the title, Any CIO Not Using Open Source Should Be Fired. It used to be that the safe choice was going with the the big enterprise companies and their big ticket proprietary software. A killer combination of low upfront cost and speed of innovation in open source software is causing CIOs to feel like open source is becoming the safer bet.

I posted my own summary of the event on the WebGuild site under the much less flashy title of What CIOs Think About Web 2.0. The net of all this discussion is that CIOs are very open to the value that new technologies can bring in democratizing the development of web applications.

So far, the tools for web development have been primarily in the hands of expert programmers working in core IT. Web 2.0 offers the promise of bringing easier to use web development tools to the edge of the organization, enabling more innovation at the edge of the corporation.

To help make this happen, the CIO's job will be to provide core infrastructure that enables innovation at the edge while preventing unintended damage. WaveMaker's role in this market shift is to provide a development platform that enables visual assembly of web applications at the edge that comply with core IT standards for security, data and governance.

Labels: BSG Alliance, Enterprise Web 2.0, WaveMaker

Nicholas Carr covered the recent Google/Capgemini partnership announcement here. We are seeing an "Innovator's Dilemma" market appear before our eyes - cheap but underpowered Google apps against expensive, full-featured Microsoft apps. While the feature bigots laugh, Google apps will creep into the corporate IT fabric around the edges.

It will be interesting to see how the SIs start to knit Google apps into the corporate IT environment. There will be an opportunity to create the equivalent of SalesForce.com's App Exchange around Google's apps/gadgets/storage. By driving an on-demand platform into Microsoft's turf, Google accomplishes two goals:

1. Keep Microsoft off balance so they can't put all their efforts into taking on Google in Search
2. Open up a "protected" market where Microsoft can't follow without undermining its own desktop business

Google recently announced pub/sub gadgets, which makes their potential role as an enterprise platform provider even more interesting.

Labels: Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Web 2.0, Google, Google Gadgets

My friend Lee Wilson just posted an entry on the impact of Web 2.0 technology on school software that you can read here. He spent some time talking to ActiveGrid partner Eljakim about their Carel Student Attendance System that we announced here.

He believes that Web 2.0 will give parents more control over their children's education and accelerate the trend towards statewide deployment of educational software. What he believes are needed are effective and easy-to-use tools for building Web 2.0 apps. Sounds like a job for Activegrid!

Labels: ActiveGrid, Education, Eljakim, Enterprise Web 2.0, Lee Wilson

Judith Hurwitz recently wrote a very interesting article comparing the Web 2.0 tools world today with the early days of client/server GUI builders. Her article is located here. Among other clever things, she says:

Just as PowerBuilder provided a way for the masses to create a graphical first
generation environment, so this next generation of development tools will bring
Web 2.0 to a broad audience.

This summarizes exactly the market opportunity we are seeing at ActiveGrid. The reality is that most corporations use internet for external, customer-facing apps but deploy old-fashioned client/server employee-facing apps behind the firewall. Observations about the cobbler’s children having the worst shoes definitely apply!

Our goal is to bring the web revolution to client/server developers who have been left behind by complex code frameworks like J2EE, .NET, even Rails. Mitchell Kertzman, who is on our board, is helping us undo the client/server revolution he started at PowerSoft. Our goal is to drive the pendulum from distributed, fat-client systems back to centralized, thin-client systems.

Labels: ActiveGrid, Cobbler's Children, Enterprise Web 2.0, Judith Hurwitz, Mitchell Kertzman, Web 2.0