The Business Value of Web 2.0 for Enterprises

Corporate IT has always been centered on application development and maintenance. Each evolution of computing, from mainframe to client/server to web 1.0, brings dramatically improved efficiency, significantly lowered costs and new business opportunities. Web 2.0 is not different either. The web 2.0 technology stack offers real, tangible, and measurable benefits to enterprises as a better way to build, deploy and maintain enterprise IT solutions, resulting in better user productivity, lower operations costs and reduced development and maintenance costs: * Reduced development and maintenance costs. The Web 2.0 technology stack eliminates the need to install client software, enabling companies to leverage the Internet more cost-effectively. Equally important, an organization can deploy the same version of a web 2.0 application to all its users, across heterogeneous client configurations and network connection types. This eliminates the need to develop and maintain multiple client software versions, the need to standardize client systems and the need to upgrade network infrastructure. * Reduced operations costs. All clients gain access to new or updated business application immediately upon connecting with a server—no installation is required. Businesses can thus enjoy all the cost advantages of a centralized deployment and management model. * Improved responsiveness to business drivers. The Web 2.0 technology stack empowers development teams to respond more quickly to changing business needs and shorten time-to-market for applications. The emergence of “situational applications” is a direct result of that the web 2.0 technology stack enables users, including less technical users, to create applications “instantly” as needed. Combining the web 2.0 technology stack with SOA and enterprise legacy systems, an much more agile and cost-effective IT infrastructure emerges. This infrastructure is sometime being called as “Enterprise 2.0”. New Possibilities – Social Computing Web 2.0 not enable brings significant benefits to application development, deployment and maintenance, but also brings in new possibilities: social computing. The most visible examples of social computing are blogging and wikis. Blogging enables normal business users to participate “web content development” without knowing anything about technology. As a result, it enabled an entire new way of marketing that is able to reach more people deeper at a much lower costs than ever before. Wikis, on the other side, enable new ways of collaboration that is previously only possible with expensive proprietary software. The emergence of “situational applications” is likely to have an even more profound impact. By leveraging heterogeneous data and content as well as the collective intelligence via mashup tools, business users who traditionally have to rely on enterprise IT teams now have more power at hand than ever. Source: web 2.0 journal