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Web 2.0 applications offer a great way for businesses to boost agility by finding new and more interesting ways to reach customers -- but without a clear and well thought-out strategy, Web 2.0 can easily become a Mess 2.0.

Prakash Sinha, a product manager with Cisco, recently joined ebizQ to discuss the strategies he shared in a webinar entitled How the Internet's Largest Bookstore Mashes SOA and Web 2.0.

Where to Develop Web 2.0 Applications

According to Sinha, the network is actually the most logical place to develop Web 2.0 apps -- and he cited Netscape and Google as proof.

Both were both key companies in changing the way user-facing applications are written; as Sinha notes about Google's introduction of Ajax.

"What these technologies did was take all the applications from the data center and web-enabled them," he says. "And now, with the Google revolution, it’s actually creating these rich Internet applications based on these Ajax and JavaScript object innovation technologies."

Mashups and remix applications are another example. These applications create traffic on the network and demonstrate the need to scale and secure the infrastructure. Layer 4 through layer 7 are changing, and the network is also changing, to become more application-aware and application fluent, he points out.

Proof of Concept for Web 2.0

Sinha cites another case example in a Cisco customer that offers the largest bookstore in the world and had fulfillment channels that it wanted to reuse. The customer had a large competitor based in the West Coast and needed to reduce its cost of doing business, so the customer ended up creating new storefronts on its infrastructure, as well as partner storefronts. In order to mediate challenges, such as not being able to control security for partners, the customer used Cisco technology to meet these needs and grow business.

Architecture and User Interaction

For this particular customer, a particular innovation was one-click ordering and facilitation of interaction with partners. But can something like that be architected into business and development processes?

"Architecture is a key component of how you design how the user interacts with your systems," he says.

One-click ordering is a great example because it reduces the amount of clicks a user needs to do and enables customization of the user experience, making it easier for the customer to navigate the website and reducing latency of the interaction.

"That's one of the key things you should look for when you're architecting an infrastructure for user facing," he points out.

Five Steps to Network Nirvana

And speaking of architecture, Sinha also points out that a simpler architecture can be key in order to deliver a flexible architecture with consistent policies. Simpler makes governance easier and enables faster development.

The following are Sinha's recommendations for the key things to look for from a network perspective:

• How to virtualize service endpoints
• How to secure these endpoints
• How to deliver the scalable and highly reusable services
• How to offload (because reuse is the key goal and utilization and improving utilization is a key goal)
• How to accelerate and offload this processing because you want to reduce the latency for the user and then of course, management is a key goal as well
• How to create some policy driven IT infrastructure so that it’s easier to manage.

Executive Summary by Krissi Danielsson 

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