The application future shock

Insightful analysis by consultants Steve Taylor and Jim Metzler, plus links to the latest WAN news headlines

The last few newsletters have begun to describe the perfect storm whereby IT deploys three key initiatives and ends up with applications that are essentially not usable. The preceding newsletters described the impact of virtualization and of Web-services based applications. This newsletter will describe the impact of Web 2.0.

A lot of IT professionals view the phrase Web 2.0 as either just marketing hype that is devoid of any meaning or they associate it exclusively with social networking sites such as MySpace. While that reaction is understandable, it tends to make IT professionals unable to grasp the impact of Web 2.0 on the enterprise. From a business perspective the goal of Web 2.0 is to allow for greater flexibility for presenting information to the user. Admittedly, that is vague. A key component of Web 2.0 is that the content is very dynamic and alive, and that as a result people keep coming back to the Web site. That is a little less vague and should begin to concern you because if the content is truly dynamic, that reduces the ability of IT to use traditional caching techniques to optimize performance. (Compare Application Acceleration and WAN Traffic Optimization products)

To us, one of the most concrete aspects of Web 2.0 is not what it does, but the fact that Web 2.0 applications are typically constructed by aggregating other applications together. This has become such a common concept that a new term, mashup, has been coined to describe it. According to Wikipedia, a mashup is a Web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool - a typical example is the use of cartographic data from Google Maps to add location information to real-estate data from Craigslist, thereby creating a new and distinct service that was not originally envisaged by either source.

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The last few newsletters have begun to describe the perfect storm whereby IT deploys three key initiatives and ends up with applications that are essentially not usable. The preceding newsletters described the impact of virtualization and of Web-services based applications. This newsletter will describe the impact of Web 2.0.

A lot of IT professionals view the phrase Web 2.0 as either just marketing hype that is devoid of any meaning or they associate it exclusively with social networking sites such as MySpace. While that reaction is understandable, it tends to make IT professionals unable to grasp the impact of Web 2.0 on the enterprise. From a business perspective the goal of Web 2.0 is to allow for greater flexibility for presenting information to the user. Admittedly, that is vague. A key component of Web 2.0 is that the content is very dynamic and alive, and that as a result people keep coming back to the Web site. That is a little less vague and should begin to concern you because if the content is truly dynamic, that reduces the ability of IT to use traditional caching techniques to optimize performance. (Compare Application Acceleration and WAN Traffic Optimization products)

To us, one of the most concrete aspects of Web 2.0 is not what it does, but the fact that Web 2.0 applications are typically constructed by aggregating other applications together. This has become such a common concept that a new term, mashup, has been coined to describe it. According to Wikipedia, a mashup is a Web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool - a typical example is the use of cartographic data from Google Maps to add location information to real-estate data from Craigslist, thereby creating a new and distinct service that was not originally envisaged by either source.

Mashups are cool. There is just one small problem. When you have an application that calls on another application that is designed, controlled and operated by another organization, whether that is Google or someone else, you have given up all visibility and control over that piece of your overall application. If there is an availability or performance problem you have little recourse other than to wait for the problem to go away. Not exactly proactive.

The next newsletter will be the last in this series and will give our insight into what IT organizations can do to minimize the impact of the perfect storm of cool IT initiatives.

Read more about lans & wans in Network World's LANs & WANs section.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.