What are the interesting relationships that will drive us to the future ?

I am a firm beleiver that there is in fact a paradigm shift happening that will drive a lot of the innovation starting now and taking us well into the future. The players that we are all comfortable with (IBM, HP, Microsoft, Sun, Apple, Cisco, Oracle etc.) will be joined by the new generation of players that will make us think differently about just what are the possibilities?

This paradigm shift needed to happen because innovation sometimes comes from shaking up the norm and putting it back a different way. There are a lot of interesting discussions happening from companies such as Amazon, Google, Yahoo and others that have stopped talking about computers and started talking about how to improve life with innovative ways to deal with information.

I get a much different outlook on life when I listen to Jeff Bezos (Amazon) talk about the future then I get from listening to Mark Hurd (HP) or Scott McNealy (Sun). Not that Mark and Scott are not interesting (they are) it is just that Jeff talks about how my life is going to be better and then shows me how he is going to do it even if I don't buy anything from Amazon.

We are becoming a world that is inundated with information, so much so that we are not going to be able to absorb it all. We are going to have to get better at organizaing our lives and the information that runs them. Who ever makes my life easier is generally who I am going to do business with, I don't think that is a big surprise. Information will become a commodity that needs to be diced and sliced to make it easy for me to consume and that is where the next generation Internet is going to shine (it's already starting to look good!).

Linkages between the media and the information that I deal with every day is going to make life easier. I will tell you that the media industry is starting get wise to this and understand how to take advantage. One prime example is "Food Network" which has figured out how to make food a complete experience with its TV Network and Web Site (Foodnetwork.com) you can get a great combined experience without even knowing how to cook. I can watch an interesting program on TV and then read and research all kinds of interesting follow up information with a couple of mouse clicks.

So the paradigm shift is happening but you might have to look in places that you would not have normally found innovation for technology. You need to look closely. Next time you are in the supermarket look around and see all the "tie-ins" to products and the internet and TV. It's fascinating to see where this is going. I think it will be a great ride !

Bridging the Enerprise

With all of this talk about the next generation Internet and Web 2.0 there is another thing happening that will be a challenge to large organizations to roll out these new techologies. If you look back into the past you will see that most innovation took place in the enterprise and eventually made its way to the consumer public. Today it has flipped 180 degrees. Innovation is now happeneing on the consumer side because of the Internet, the great development testbed.


One of the challenges I see with Web 2.0 is that it is a major breakthrough in the way people commnicate 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 corproate 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 Interent 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 a dilema that most enterprises are going to face and get frustrated over in the near future. I have been reading and reading and following the Web 2.0 material and there is a lot happening that I would like to use and I beleive there is a way to make this happen.


I have defined a hybrid environment that would allow the Web 2.0 tools to fucntion 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 beleive would be a great "bridge" application. The application comes from "Alfresco.org" 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 then Alfresco. If you look on their web site (Alfresco.org") you will see a whole page just dedicated to all the standards they use or are compatible with.


I am going to install Alfresco here and try to see just how this bridge concept will work. I will let you know.