Beth Gold-Bernstein: Welcome everyone and thanks for joining us today. I'm Beth Gold-Bernstein, Chair of the ebizQ Virtual Conference. Today's program is a live roundtable discussion on Web 2.0 and SOA. On July 23rd, ebizQ will hold a full day virtual conference on Web 2.0 and the enterprise featuring keynotes by David Smith of Gartner and Rob Koplowitz of Forrester. So please be sure to check out the ebizQ In Action Conference site for more information and to register.

Now, I'd like to introduce our panelists. We have with us today, Doug Wilson, IBM distinguished engineer and CTO of Portals and Collaborations Products and Vice Chairman of the Software Group Architecture Board for IBM; Dion Hinchcliffe, Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Hinchcliffe & Company and popular Web 2.0 blogger, and Ron Schmelzer, Managing Partner of ZapThink. Ron is our SOA expert on the panel.

So I'm very pleased to have such an esteemed panel with us today and I want to welcome them all and thank them all for being with us today.

Now, I'd like to start off the session by asking Dion for a definition of Web 2.0. The term includes a number of topics such as mashups, collaboration platforms, and social networking. Dion, how do you define Web 2.0?

Dion Hincliffe: Well, Beth, so defining 2.0 can be a challenge because it represents a number of significant yet very interrelated trends. But to adequately boil it down to a very simple non-technical definition, that basically is networked applications that leverage network effects. I'm not getting technical, what we're really talking about is software and communities that get smarter the more that people participate in them.

So the big old over-arching trends that we're seeing is the control and creation of content, and information, and knowledge is moving to what we called the "edge of the network". And the communities have moved a little bit away from the traditional places that was being done, like, large institutions and enterprises. And so we mean the edge of the network can mean all the people connected all the mobile devices whether they be workers using them or people out on the consumer web themselves.

And then finally, what we're really seeing is the rise of these very open platforms with an emphasis on low barrier flow and reuse of content and functionality. And this success in the Web 2.0 world in this way has begun forming things in the enterprise such as SOA, which is kind of what we're here to talk about.

BGB: Okay. Now, Doug, what you think is the significance of Web 2.0 in the enterprise? Does it enhance productivity; does it contribute to the bottom line, or business opportunities not possible before?

Doug Wilson: I think all of the above building on the excellent definition that was just given. We sort of see our customers lining up in really two genres for approaching this Web 2.0 problem.

One is the sort of technology bent, the one that is about mashups, about Ajax, about dynamic HTML-based user interfaces, and high quality Web delivered applications as well as those customers lining up along the areas or interest groups on social networking in the application of social networking, deep personalization and the like to building better more responsive business applications and applying that the community and the knowledge of the community to those applications.

Both result in improved productivity and improve effectiveness in the enterprise whether that is effectiveness of the IT professionals creating these user interfaces, or the business users using them. That power, the power of the network of users is extraordinarily compelling in a lot of business situations.

BGB: Okay. Now, Ron can you make the connection for us between Web 2.0; how are they related?

RS: Yes, thank you Beth. And, of course, thank you for having me on this Webinar. I hope that folks will get a deep understanding of both the compass Web 2.0 and Service Oriented Architecture and how they're related, which, of course, brings up your question and build upon what Doug said.

I think one the great things and one of the interesting movements that we're starting to see in IT, I would say across-the-board is the movement towards much more composeable, loosely coupled, heterogeneous, and flexible, agile styles of computing.

Now the concepts around Web 2.0 and concepts of service oriented architecture are definitely different. They espouse different ideas, first and foremost. Service oriented architecture is primarily an architectural concern, which means it's been an approach in the methodology and a style of design. And Web 2.0 is a broad-based movement that covers a variety of topics.

They actually are very related. In the Web 2.0 side, we're seeing a big movement towards empowering the user in a variety of ways. Empowering the user not just as far as better interaction with computing systems and better interaction with browser technology, but also empowering the user to create content, to collaborate with others, and to be more in control of the way that information is shared and augmented in the enterprise and, of course, in the internet as a whole.

Well, all the these movements that we're trying to see on Web 2.0 around user composition, and collaboration, generated content, wiki's, mashups, all that sort of great stuff, blogging is really the idea that the user is empowered to create all this information and create connections between the information and, of course, create value.

Now, the service oriented architecture movement is a movement in the enterprise as well is beyond. But primarily, we're focused on in the enterprise as a way of liberating or empowering the various applications and functionality within the corporate network to be composed and combine in ways that provide greater value such that we're no longer dealing with the bottlenecks or the challenges of getting the various systems to communicate with each other.

We're focusing much more on how can we extract greater value out of the systems by considering the systems to actually be a collection of services and processes to be to be composed of those services in a way that we can move loosely couple and compose them together in an increasingly more flexible with way.

Now these two movements, service oriented architecture, empowering the enterprise, and Web 2.0 empowering the individual have a great combination together and that is that we want the user to get the experience that they've become increasingly more familiar with in the broad Internet and bring that experience to the enterprise while at the same time allowing the enterprise to free up its assets so that they can be composed and mashed up in ways that enable or empowers the business user.

Too much of what we've seen is IT trying to provide the capabilities for the business user but getting in the way; more and more we're starting to see IT is spending their budget and their time simply getting the systems to work together, and work with each other, and spending less of their time really empowering the business user to get more of their technology. So we're hoping that Web 2.0 and service oriented architecture really allows IT to become more of an enabler of the capabilities of the business rather than a cost center or a bottleneck, in many ways, for people to actually get what they want out of IT.

BGB: Okay. Now, Doug or Dion, did you want to comment on some of what Ron was saying? DW: I think Ron is right on a bunch of extraordinarily good points. And perhaps it's not always obvious to people to see the connection between those two. But if you look sort of specifically at mashups, as an example, it's easy to see that mashups are the juxtaposition or a combination of information from multiple backend services. And in fact, mashups are a compositional mechanism by which an end user or a programmer can bring multiple sources of information, or transactions to bear on one problem.

And this goes right to the heart of SOA and SOA composition. As well, the people engaged in that activity -- that compositional activity are themselves implementing services. They are human implementers or orchestrators of information systems, and backend systems, and the like, and the ability -- capabilities enabled by Web 2.0 to make those information resources accessible and composeable by the end-user greatly enhances their ability to be good implementations of business services.

BGB: Okay. Now, a few provocative things there. Ron brought up the point of IT being perhaps an obstacle. And as Doug was just saying, Web 2.0 is about enabling humans to deliver business services. So let's hear what I our audience thinks. Do you view IT as an enabler or an obstacle in the organization? Maybe a bit but let's get some feedback here and then let's move on. Now, Dion, what are you seeing in terms of Web 2.0 adoption in the enterprise? Is it taking off, are we at the early adoption stage, or do you see significant advancements in the adoption of Web 2.0 in the enterprise?
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