ZDNet's Enterprise Web 2.0: The top 10 posts of 2009
As we get ready to enter the final year of the decade, here's a round-up of what you found interesting here on Enterprise Web 2.0 based on actual readership. We'll see what the new year brings us but 2009 was full of notable developments that will have a lasting impact to way we using technology in business.This year was a significant one for next-generation IT and business, particularly with the rapid rise of cloud computing and emerging trends in social computing. The "Great Recession" of 2009 itself was also a significant topic as well as strategic business transformation using Web 2.0 technologies.Based on what readers here found most interesting or otherwise worthy of their attention, here's a breakdown of what the top 10 posts here on ZDNet's Enterprise Web 2.0, in reverse order.
As we get ready to enter the final year of the decade, here's a round-up of what you found interesting here on Enterprise Web 2.0 based on actual readership. We'll see what the new year brings us but 2009 was full of notable developments that will have a lasting impact to way we using technology in business.
This year was significant for next-generation IT and business, particularly with the rapid rise of cloud computing and emerging trends in social computing. The "Great Recession" of 2009 itself was also a top subject here as well as strategic business transformation using Web 2.0 technologies.
So based on what readers found most intriguing or otherwise worthy of their attention, here's a breakdown of what the top 10 posts here on ZDNet's Enterprise Web 2.0, in reverse order of popularity:
June 5th, 2009: I called this major new trend in on-demand enterprise IT a "delicate balance of risk and benefit" and noted that "cloud computing is quickly beginning to shape up as one of the biggest new IT trends. Hundreds of thousands of business customers are already using cloud offerings from Amazon (Amazon Web Services), Salesforce (Force.com), and Google (many offerings, including Google App Engine), including a growing number of Fortune 500 companies."
October 25th, 2009: Social networking sites like Facebook or mobile apps on platforms like the iPhone, Palm’s new webOS, and Android, will ultimately herald a change in the way that we work with our IT systems in the enterprise. The once relatively unified world of the Internet, with a few major top-level types of access directly connected to it (browser, e-mail, IRC client, newsreader, etc.) and a few key sub-apps such as search that virtually everyone online used have been extended — as well as fragmented — into popular new channels into which users are now rapidly moving en masse.
April 11th, 2008: My only major post from 2008 which made the top ten this year again, showing the sustained interest in cloud computing, particularly specific comparisons of two of the top players in the space. I noted back then that "the decision for enterprises on how far to leverage computing platforms in the cloud will be.. complicated."
The economics will increasingly make more sense to run business applications on these new platforms now that major competition has emerged in the PaaS marketplace that will put major downward pressure on already strikingly low costs to operate. But the issues around governance, security, privacy, and control will be hard to overcome. Make no mistake however, these platforms offer not only major cost savings but non-trivial productivity boosts as they competitively strive to be the cheapest and lowest barrier place online to run your business applications and engage your employees, customers, and partners.
January 29th, 2009: Some business leaders will be looking at paring things back to the basics [in 2009] while a different sort will be looking at entirely new avenues to survive and thrive. The decisions we make now can greatly affect what happens to our organizations going forward. The good news is that most enterprises actually have a fair number of compelling options right now if they are willing to think outside the box. While some might look at the social aspects of things like Web 2.0 as marginal subjects when things get tough, nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to the deeper implications of Web 2.0 in the enterprise.
June 1st, 2009: As a Web-based consumer application, you quickly discover that while Twitter itself is a terrific environment, it isn’t very usable yet for businesses because of it lacks a variety of capabilities needed to fully work on the local intranet (details on this below). You wonder what other options exist to bring microblogging to the workplace in a business-friendly manner. Plenty, it turns out.
January 13th, 2009: As for 2009, I predict a rebuilding year for most organizations, with a few that will use innovative new ideas to break out with major successes. With the large network effects that have been built online over the last few years by the major internet players, we will have fewer fast growth businesses in the major categories, but there is still plenty of room for major new products in industry sectors and classes of data that haven’t seen wide penetration online yet. This will also include, as we’ll see, areas that have only partially thrived online traditionally, like real estate and investment banking, that now must be completely transformed and remade, as the downfall of these industries leaves a large vacuum that must be filled by something.
March 26th, 2009: When we look back many years from now, it’s probable that cloud computing will be regarded as both a momentous and major change of course in the history of software; many future computing platforms will be created and operated by what seemingly amount to utility companies. While this might seem like a boring future for computing, it’s a necessarily pragmatic evolution as the very size and scope of modern software requires new economic models in order to remain cost effective. Virtually any online application these days has to scale to a few million users as quickly and inexpensively as possible.
However, cost is just one of the interesting aspects of cloud computing and the stakes are huge: The Wall Street Journal reported today that the cloud computing industry is estimated to reach $42 billion by 2012, or nearly half the entire software business.
May 30th, 2009: Google Wave’s relevance to the enterprise might seem premature with so many of the early and current Web 2.0 applications (blogs, wikis, social networks, Twitter-style social messaging, mashups, etc.) still — often arduously — making their way into the workplace years after their inception. Though we seem to finally be hitting a tipping point with 2.0 tools at work, Wave itself seems credible enough to get on our watchlists, at least to understand the implications.
The real question is whether there are really such significant gaps in the current state of Web-based communication that we need something new like Wave. With Google’s tendency to emphasize the consumer world first and the enterprise later, it’s also valid to ask if Wave will really have much impact on businesses. Interestingly, you might be surprised at some of the answers, so let’s take a look.
March 19th, 2009: The Enterprise 2.0 landscape continues to change: The increasingly popular Twitter service has become almost trendy to use in some business circles, though it currently predominates in PR and marketing for the moment. This has given rise to a new generation of enterprise-class social messaging applications such as Yammer and Signals are used behind the firewall these days, though these are not reaching even double-digit percentages of adoption yet. Mobile devices especially have become rich multi-channel collaboration consoles for communicating in just about any way you prefer including voice, e-mail, SMS, chat, Web, social messaging, and pretty much anything else for which you can find an installable application. There seem to be countless choices when it comes to communication and collaborating in today’s workplace.
But when it comes to Enterprise 2.0 in particular — and you can read my most detailed explanation of exactly what the concepts of Enterprise 2.0 are here — the software solution that most organizations seem to reach for today in an almost knee-jerk reaction is Microsoft Sharepoint. In fact, last summer Forrester predicted that Sharepoint would “steamroll” the Enterprise 2.0 market despite “taking heat from some observers about SharePoint’s wiki, blog and social networking functionality."
September 6th, 2009: This post hit the front page of Slashdot and made the case that the Web has become an emergent operating system in virtually every detail: "While there are multiple ways of looking at the Web as an operating system, from cloud environments that mimic a desktop operating system to sets of services packaged together and bundled as an individual product to companies, the largest — and the most significant — is the idea of an overarching and emergent Internet operating system. The data, services, and even communities of the Web are now programmatic and can be incorporated and remixed into any other business or product at will. The concept of a Web OS isn’t new. But its arrival on the scene in compelling form with serious impact to the enterprise is."
Stay tuned for more year end wrap-ups on cloud computing and other topics. Also, please do let me know below in Talkback what your favorite posts were here on Enterprise Web 2.0 so we can continue the discussion in 2010.
4. Cloud computing and the return of the platform wars