BEA takes the Web 2.0 plunge, in the deep end

After a lengthy gestation period, BEA Systems recently delivered three enterprise Web 2.0 applications at  the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference  (ETech) in San Diego. The new products aim at enabling deep end-user participation, while at the same time giving IT the management and governance control essential to enterprise systems.
BEA has been talking about the products for over a year under various code names, as the company prepared to dive into the turbulent waters of social computing. The new offerings, part of the AquaLogic suite, include AquaLogic Ensemble (formerly Project Runner), Aqua-Logic Pages (formerly Project Builder), and AquaLogic Pathways (formerly Project Graffiti).
Ensemble provides authentication and access control, while allowing users to create reusable widgets from new or existing code. The users can then develop mashups, while Ensemble tracks what users do within applications. The mashups can be independent of platform and hosting environment.
Pages allows non-IT users to tap into enterprise data and create Web pages, blogs, and Wikis from a palette of drag-and-drop components, while the system tracks changes, versioning, and access. Users write to or edit pages as they would a word-processing document or an email.
Pathways, a collaborative information discovery tool, combines tagging, bookmarking, and analytics to provide more relevant search results. Users can  develop their own customizable tags or rely on tags from others, while bookmarks maintain lists of favorite or important documents. Pathways also allows used to extract metadata from a variety of sources to create a global set of properties.
BEA has also established a resource site for enterprise collaboration, http://en.terpri.se, which is reminiscent of del.icio.us, a non-enterprise social networking and bookmarking Web service.

Based on a recent, albeit non-scientific, survey I did via my blog polling feature, a sizable portion of readers think vendors like BEA will do well by incorporating Web 2.0 features into their product lines. We've also seen other vendors go down the Web 2.0 path, including Cisco, Intel, and Oracle.

Indeed, I was at an IBM open source conference last week, and the topic of Web 2.0 functions and business models was a recurring theme, even if not so prominently on the agenda. The analysts seemed to take the discussion there repeatedly. More on the implications of Web 2.0 on IBM in upcoming blogs.