By now everyone knows that there’s been a sea change on the Internet. Many people call this new wave “Web 2.0,” but that doesn’t tell us much about what this new Web actually is. That’s why here at BEA we prefer the term “social computing.” It’s not as flashy as Web 2.0, but it’s a lot more accurate: the next generation of the online apps is being shaped not by developers in ivory towers, but by everyday people working together to improve the Web for everyone.

When people talk about Web 2.0, there are a few sites that are routinely mentioned, including Flickr, Wikipedia, and del.icio.us. One thing that you’ll notice about these sites is that while there may be instances in which people have used them for business applications, they’re really consumer-focused. They can help us learn, laugh, and share, but they don’t generally help us do business better. Some commentators doubt whether social computing has any validity at all for the business side.

Why should consumers have all the fun?

At BEA, we look at this differently. Every day we see people creating value and increasing agility with social computing techniques, and isn’t that what we all want from our IT and business organizations? Why shouldn’t enterprises apply these same concepts to business problems?

That’s why we launched our line of social computing products: Pages, Ensemble, and Pathways. These products leverage the dynamic, flexible, collaborative nature of the new Web and harnesses that power for business.

• Pages is a Web-authoring tool that anyone can use; if you can type and use a mouse, you can create a Web application.
• Ensemble is a Web-resource management tool that makes it easy for developers to create mashups and share components across your organization, increasing efficiency and productivity.
• Pathways lets users tag and rate content to capture precious data from knowledge workers that would otherwise be lost. It also lets developers quickly and easily create search-driven applications that mesh with your existing enterprise content system.

At first glance, this may seem like a departure from BEA’s traditional product offerings, but it’s not. Our SOA and business process automation products help you free up data that’s been trapped in silos and put that data to work. And these new social computing technologies take it a step further, by allowing business users to directly shape Web applications with data and services, and by freeing up data that’s trapped within individual people and putting both to work. That’s the nature of collaboration and the foundation of social computing and the new Web.

Of course, social computing isn’t for everyone. While most of us will see the advantage to unlocking data and allowing it to flow freely, some organizations simply aren’t ready to collaborate. But for those of you who have marveled at the things people are doing with social computing and longed to bring that power to bear in business, your time has come. And BEA is here to help you make your vision a reality.

Cheers!

Alfred Chuang
Chairman and CEO
BEA Systems