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Hinchcliffe's Enterprise 2.0 Predictions 2008

Nobody should be surprised that with the beginning of a new year comes a whole lotta predictions about how 2008 will role out in the big wide world of the Internet. These ones are all about Enterprise 2.0 and are from Dion Hinchcliffe, the guy with the really nice Enterprise 2.0 graphics. Here’s an overview of what he thinks will happen this year

We aren’t going to give you a blow by blow of his predictions, because well…you could just as easily drop on over to ZDNet and read them first hand. What we will give you is a synopsis - which for many of you busy folks - is what you really need.

Hinchcliffe has called 2008 the year that “organizations connect the dots and upgrade themselves to next generation enterprises”. This happens as we finally see the “gelling” of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Software as a Service (SaaS) and Web 2.0 that will define the next generation organization.

He outlines the raw materials required to make this happen:

• aging of existing IT systems
• the rise of up-and-coming new approaches such as highly capable new Web-based applications
• mashups
• collective intelligence powered business software
• Web-oriented architectures
• social software

The new/updated solutions that are coming forward, will be driven not only by necessity, but by the grassroots efforts of the workers in the trenches who have learned a thing or two about the web and the whole Web 2.0 era.

So keeping this mind, his predictions are fairly straightforward:

• We will see changes to how SOA is implemented. It will be become more web-oriented and lightweight. This will help SaaS style services and mashups become more common.
• With more and more implementations of Web 2.0 apps, SaaS and mashups in the enterprise we’ll see two big requirements that need to be looked after: security and infrastructure governance.
• Intranets will get social networking capabilities, lots more unstructured information in blogs and wikis, enterprise 2.0 will become a standard feature…all resulting in the need for really strong enterprise search - which will remain broken or limited for most organizations.
• The continued rise of the Blackberry and now the iPhone will help keep workers connected to business processes and web-based collaboration.
• Ajax will be over-run in the enterprise by new RIA platforms like Adobe AIR and Microsoft’s Silverlight. We’ll also see a few collective intelligence platforms and enterprise decision management support apps implemented.
• The software giants will reign supreme over vendors selling Web 2.0 versions of traditional enterprise apps. But the market is still there for SMB’s.

What’s nice about Hinchcliffe is that he clearly understands the relationship between technology/business strategy movements like SOA and SaaS and Web 2.0. He helps us get perspective on how we can use Web 2.0 technologies within organizations and how they integrate with our SOA strategy (or change our SOA strategy).

What do you think of his predictions? Agree? Disagree?