Oracle Enterprise 2.0

What IS Enterprise 2.0? With the acquisition of BEA, Oracle has realigned a large set of products under this new description and this blog intends to clarify how these Oracle technologies can help create new solutions in the enterprise which leverage the advancements seen on the Internet.

First off, definitions... Andrew McAfee seems to be a favorite choice within Oracle to define what E2.0 means...

Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.

Social software enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities. (Wikipedia's definition).

Platforms are digital environments in which contributions and interactions are globally visible and persistent over time.

Emergent means that the software is freeform, and that it contains mechanisms to let the patterns and structure inherent in people's interactions become visible over time.

Freeform means that the software is most or all of the following:

• Optional
• Free of up-front workflow
• Egalitarian, or indifferent to formal
• organizational identities
• Accepting of many types of data

Emergent social software? Basically what we are talking about here is taking the technologies and ideas that drive websites such as Linked In, Facebook, Wikipedia and Flickr and using them in an enterprise environment. For example...

Where does Oracle fit into this space? Well over the past few years Oracle has been acquiring an abundance of best of breed companies across the spectrum of middleware technologies. Some are directly related to E2.0, such as content management and portals. Some provide functionality such as the Identity Management Suite, enabling the centralized control and provisioning of users to your enterprise applications.

The technologies which come under the enterprise 2.0 heading are, from a pricing perspective, separated out into suites which we will discuss in more detail in a later article. But they are mainly Oracle WebCenter Suite, Oracle WebCenter Services and Oracle Content Management.

So via the blog we intend to go into detail on the different areas of Oracle's Enterprise 2.0 technologies, ways in which they can be integrated together and discuss the future of 2.0.