In Search of Enterprise 2.0

It's the time of year when pundits preach and prophets of all kinds reflect on the year fleeting past and the one to come. So it's no surprise to see a slew of predictive data hit the inbox.

Example: Goldman Sachs' annual note on its corporate IT spending survey predicts that 2007 budgets will be a bit larger than 2006, showing between 6 percent and 7 percent growth. Leading the trends that will "destabilize the status quo" in IT products and services is something the financial firm calls the "emerging theme of Enterprise 2.0."

Now, I'm hip to the term "Web 2.0," more or less, but "Enterprise 2.0" is a bit tougher to get a bead on. According to Goldman Sachs, Enterprise 2.0 refers to the use of technology to create better organizational collaboration among "stakeholder groups" workers, business partners, customers, and the like.

The trend involves the use of technologies such as content management, Web portals, and instant messaging to build dynamically changing sources of data that all can share. The analysts say that Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Google, and Yahoo are among the key vendors that stand to profit from Enterprise 2.0.

In a recent blog, Andrew McAfee, the associate professor at Harvard Business School who seems to have created the term Enterprise 2.0, maintains that some folk are misusing it. He stresses that his definition is heavily focused on "human interaction with technology," more than on specific tools and techniques."Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers," McAfee wrote earlier this year. Like a blog or a wiki, an Enterprise 2.0 project builds data interactively over time, so that an online community is formed, with lots of information sharing.

In my view, all this has a lot to do with storage networking. In fact, it's not overstating things to say that without a solid storage foundation, it's not likely that any Enterprise 2.0 project could possibly take off.

Need proof? Here is a quick glance at how some of your favorite storage technologies fit into the Enterprise 2.0 scheme of things:

All of these trends in storage networking point to more collaborative pools of accessible data, built from common enterprise communication sources that are unstructured. So, if like me, you're still fuzzy on what Enterprise 2.0 is or isn't, it's a safe bet that keeping an eye on the leading storage trends will help you stay current.

And you'll want to stay current. Goldman Sachs warns that the penalty for falling off the Enterprise 2.0 bandwagon could be severe: "Investors who ignore this trend will do so at their peril given its ability to dramatically reshape leadership among enterprise technology companies and business models over the next decade."— Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch