From Enterprise 1.0 to Web 2.0

I spent some time with Howard Morgasen (smart guy) last week, along with John Newton (Founder of Documentum and now Alfresco), and he noted something that I'd never thought of before. As he relates on his blog,

One of the challenges I see with Web 2.0 is that it is a major breakthrough in the way people communicate and share information. Unfortunately all of that information has to reside on the Internet. If I was a major corporation then I would have privacy issues because a lot of my information is behind corporate firewalls which cannot be seen on the Internet.

If you talk to most people who are developing Web 2.0 applications there is a heavy reliance on the internet being there for their application to work. In other words, if I pointed a Web 2.0 application at my network behind the firewall it would not function.

This is an interesting point on a number of levels. The first is the security/privacy issue that Howie points to. (He told John and me that when he asked the Web 2.0 companies about whether they could run behind the company firewall, they universally looked stumped - suddenly, the wizardry looked slightly less sexy.)

But beyond this, there's also the reliance aspect. This is a blessing and a curse.

For example, I've heard it said, "Skype is wonderful because they don't have to invest in any infrastructure - the phone/cable/etc. companies provide it all for them, gratis." True enough, but only to the extent that these infrastructure providers want to. What happens if Comcast decides that it likes it's VOIP service more than Vonage's, or Skype's? They can do things on their network to privilege Comcast VOIP traffic to the detriment of these other "parasitic" applications. (Comcast is already doing this. Comcast has startedthrottling back speeds for users who clog their network, e.g., people who use Vonage). It's fine to build one's business on others' efforts, in other words, but don't be surprised when the producers fight back (Publishers vs. Google, for example).

Back to the bridge to Web 2.0. How does Howie see it happening?

I have defined a hybrid environment that would allow the Web 2.0 tools to function against the corporate data that exists behind the firewall. Since most of the Web 2.0 tools are based on Open Source standard tools I would need to find an application or set of applications that could simulate the backend Internet. I would call these applications the "bridge". The bridge would be installed behind the corporate firewall and would understand how to speak to Web 2.0 tools on one side and how to speak to legacy systems on the other side.

I have found the first application that I believe would be a great "bridge" application. The application comes from Alfresco, a relatively new company founded by John Newton (the founder of Documentum). Alfresco has come up with what is billed as an enterprise content management system. Of course you would expect John and his team to know a little about content management. I sat with John last week and discussed Alfresco and what it does and how it works. What the two of us came up with is that it is a perfect "bridge" product. I have never seen an application that was built from more Open Source Standards than Alfresco....

Self-congratulation aside, I think there must be a whole class of "bridge" applications out there waiting to happen. Things that will pull legacy content/data from curmudgeonly applications and display them in a Web 2.0 browser. Sounds cool to me....

Posted by Matt Asay on November 8, 2005 04:31 PM