What you don’t know can hurt you – especially when it’s Web 2.0 information.

It’s estimated that enterprise IT systems can now access at best 20 percent of pertinent data generated by employees, customers, analysts and competitors.

“These people go the Web, they blog about it, they write customer reviews, they write notes on email and all that information is not readily accessible by enterprise IT systems, so there’s sort of a gap that’s opened up between the enterprise and the Web 2.0 generation data,” said Denodo Technologies VP of Marketing Suresh Chandrasekaran. "And also, there is a ton of relevant structured information in the Hidden Web like industry trends and projections, demographic data and competitive technical and pricing data, which all goes untapped today.

Finding and structuring this data and merging it with traditional IT systems is the challenge.

“In the past, a lot of the feedback about the products would come in form of warranty forms and customer service forms. But today people will send an email or go out on digitalphotographyreview.com and write about what problems they have, what features they like and what competitors they compare you to,“ Chandrasekaran added.

"All this information would be very valuable to a product manager at a company like Canon, or to a warranty manager to prevent costly blowups they could have predicted if they knew about it," he noted. "We are able to search for that information but also structure and aggregate that information so we can answer questions like ‘How often was the Canon 20D compared to the Nikon’ or ‘What were the most frequently reported three problems?’

"And this is a summary of information across, let’s say 3000 blog entries or we could ask the same question from your internal CRM systems’ call notes,” Chandrasekaran said.

To display the data, Denodo uses Web 2.0 techniques that follow a SOA-related paradigm to provide data mashups that feed traditional applications, data warehouses, BI and single views.

“We use a combination of search indexing and data keyword analysis, Hidden Web data extraction and virtual integration of structured databases from multiple heterogeneous stories and Web extraction,” Chandrasekaran said.

Once the information is combined, it appears to consuming applications like just another database, presented as data services consumed by SOAs or as analytics or reports or portals that provide unique insights.

Chandrasekaran also noted Denodo’s interesting origins at a Technical University of Madrid project.

“t was all funded and driven by problems faced by businesses and governments in Europe,“ he observed. “One of our applications is for the EU’s Homeland Security Agency which is asking us to analyze all sorts of information across Europe and related it back to terrorist activity.”

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Market share and -- and investment dollars -- keep flowing toward the Software as a Service sector, and OpSource is the latest firm to benefit from both trends.

One week ago, the company received $20 million in funding from a group led by Intel Partners to expand sales, marketing and R&D.

“Intel sees that Software as a Service is changing the way that people use software and the underlying technologies. They wanted to get close to the SaaS companies and see how their product could be used more effectively for them,” Opsource CEO Treb Ryan said.

It is also rolling out SaaSTrak, which can help software companies provide new on-demand applications in as little as 72 hours. A client need only to fill out a two-page questionnaire about their business and infrastructure before receiving a custom delivery solution.

Software companies, Ryan believes,“shouldn’t focus on things like running a 24/7 secure operation -– those are the kind of things that can hold them back from focusing on what strategically differentiates them in the market,” he notes.

“Today, no one in the market is going to really give that customer the ability to go on the Web and buy a per-user-per-month or per-transaction type of delivery of their service and get moving very quickly, he added.

The questionnaire’s content and format was based on their years of working with over 80 SaaS companies to discover common elements that ensured success.

The result yields “the basic support and infrastructure and the basic support and management needs that normally you would have to spend days with a business consultant to discover,” Ryan noted.

“What we discovered in this on-demand world is that the ability to start quickly and work with a company as it’s growing is far more effective than trying to do a long business consultancy arrangement at the beginning of their lifecycle,” Ryan said.

“It’s all about getting your customers up to and started,” he maintained.

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SOAs, ESBs, Web Services are proliferating -- along with high-volume XML-based data streams that have to be translated into and from a system’s native format.

“The SOA world is driving for more common message formats, which is what XML gives us,” Coral8 CEO Terry Cunningham notes. But he also noted how translating bigger, more complex and often nested XML messages between native formats adds considerable processing time.

“A lot of our customers in the major categories of financial services and sytems management and e-commerce are dealing with milliseconds, and any extra processing is unacceptable,” Cunningham said.

In response, Coral8’s latest version of its CEP engine avoids translation overhead. “We don’t do the translations, we run the process in native XML. That’s where if you run benchmarks, it runs much faster."

Cunningham feels eliminating the added cost of processing XML will become an important differentiator and because a wide variety of customers with heterogeneous streams of data showing up as XML are weighing in to back native XML support.

“ERP, supply chain and RFID systems are looking for more generic ways to handle messaging environments -- and for them, that’s XML,” he said. “And that will make our developers’ lives a lot easier,” he noted.

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If you're one of the many people worldwide who enjoys a fresh pint of Guinness Stout, you may have SeeWhy Software's new approach to Business Intelligence software to thank for it.

A single factory in Dublin provides the 10 million glasses of Guinness drunk daily – and SeeWhy CEO Charles Nicholls explained some of the logistical difficulties in getting it shipped worldwide.

“The product was leaving the factory on time, but it was arriving on time less than 50 percent of the time,” Nicholls noted.

But SeeWhy’s ability to analyze historical and seasonal data to find unusual shipping conditions, then issues alerts via e-mail alerts and dashboard displays, has brought that up to 80 percent.

Ease of use was another big challenge. Nicholls also spoke about how increasingly hard-to-use Business Intelligence systems have created problems.

“The first generation of BI was oriented around the presentation of data: ‘Let’s get the numbers of the people,’” Nicholls said. “The second generation is much more sophisticated; it’s oriented around, just as in the case of Guinness, presenting the problems … and telling me what I need to be worried about. And that takes it to a much higher level of use which enables you to deploy it much more broadly.

“In the case of Guinness, these are guys in the shipping department who would not ordinarily benefit from BI,” Nicholls noted. “But you’re giving information right in context, which says, ‘This shipment is running late and is this is going to cause you a problem in your supply chain in the next five days unless you do something about it.’ That’s of higher value and much easier to act on.”

Nicholls went on to further detail several other scenarios for BI 2.0’s interplay with SOA.

“BI 2.0 is basically enables you to plug Business Intelligence directly onto an SOA, so you can analyze a stream of events coming off an ESB and automatically drive closed-loop actions…rather than relying on an analyst to notice a problem and take corrective action.”

“The key thing is that you can now view events as a data source upon which you can provide analysis. And that’s fundamentally different,” he summarized.

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When it comes to building an SOA, "It's all about, 'How do we get information to the business user in a simple straightforward way?' says Paul Patrick, Chief Architect for BEA's AquaLogic family of service infrastructure products.

The company released a new version of AquaLogic today that may go a long way toward realizing that goal.

"You used to have to program to get access to this information, especially in the SOA world, so what we've done is add an Excel add-in so that an Excel user -- without having to learn to write macros, can just double-click and take advantage of this data," Patrick says.

"That's why we thought it was so important to push this new Excel add-on out there so a broader community could take advantage of it," he added. "The reality is that when we think about SOA it's not about technology, it's really about creating a new ability for the business to be more agile, so the business has to take a critical role in making that happen."

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Wikis (Hawaiin for "quick") are giving a new burst to personal publishing -- and are now quickly gaining traction in the enterprise space as an effective collaborative tool.

A recent alliance between an enterprising domain name connoisseur and a proven technology company could accelerate both trends. Last month, John Gotts paid $2.86 million for the wiki.com domain name, and two weeks ago, he announced a deal with Mindtouch Systems to provide the back-end technology to power what he hopes will be a million new wikis within a year.

"It's a fast, quick way to get your own Web site up," said Gotts. "Like MySpace, it's a way that people can come together and share their knowledge," for fun or profit.

"Enterprises can now look to wikis to be not just not just an experiement, but a serious business tool," said Mark Kurtz, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Mindtouch. Kurtz described how companies can start deploying wikis at a department level and then scale them to the enterprise level.

Mindtouch's DekiWiki Open Source solution -- which requires a $2,995 appliance -- can be deployed in 15 minutes, added Kurtz, who described real-world collaboration scenarios that provided a diminshed reliance on email, less vulnerability to spam and viruses -- and greater visibility into enterprise functions and feedback for all company employees.

Kurtz himself became a convert when managing four separate offices via DekiWiki before he joined Mindtouch.

"It allowed us to not rely on email as much; we could see upates instantly, see that documents had been updated and review each other's work without relying on email threads," Kurtz said.

"What that meant for productivity was the we got 17 proposals out the door instead of 11," he noted.

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The ITIL, or Information Technology Infrastructure Library standard collects best practices and processes on the planning, provision and support of IT services so they best support business objectives. It was
designed by Office of Government Commerce in the U.K. seven years ago.

Now, Entuity Software has developed its Eye of the Storm management suite that extends ITIL’s advantages. We spoke to Bill Tracy, Entuity's vice president of product strategy about the ITIL standard's benefits and how it can work with BPM or SOA approach.

"It's really about a top-down approach to IT service management," Tracy said. "ITIL takes a business perspective management versus the bottom-up approach that's been traditional for the last ten years or so. It's about assessing business needs and strategies, tying them to the IT subsystem, and assuring that it's meeting the goals of those strategies," Tracy said.

"This standard has quite of following. It has an international following and a whole group of service providers that have been certified in it," Tracy added. "As you're rolling out BSM and BPM strategies, ITIL is going to be fundamental to that."

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