David Smith, Gartner Fellow and co-chair of the Web Innovation Summit, is giving a presentation on Innovating the Enterprise with Web 2.0, as the opening keynote of a free virtual conference on July 23, 2008. His comments will examine how the enterprise can benefit from the two megatrends of Web advancement and consumerization, which are inextricably linked and feed and amplify each other. His presentation will give attendees a preview of the Web 2.0 track of content which will be covered at Gartner’s September Summit. You can register for the virtual conference here.

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Cloud computing heralds an evolution of business that is no less influential than e-business. Gartner maintains that the very confusion and contradiction that surrounds the term 'cloud computing' signifies its potential to change the status quo in the IT market. Gartner analysts who will be presenting at the Web Innovation Summit have just released a special report on cloud computing.

Here are some highlights from the report:

Darryl Plummer: "During the past 15 years, a continuing trend toward IT industrialization has grown in popularity as IT services delivered via hardware, software and people are becoming repeatable and useable by a wide range of customers and service providers. This is due, in part to the commoditization and standardization of technologies, in part to virtualization and the rise of service-oriented software architectures, and most importantly, to the dramatic growth in popularity of the Internet. Taken together, these three major trends constitute the basis of a discontinuity that will create a new opportunity to shape the relationship between those who use IT services and those who sell them. Essentially it will mean that users of IT-related services will be able to focus on what the service provides them rather than how the services are implemented or hosted. Gartner maintains that although names for this type of operation have come into vogue at different times – utility computing, software as a service (SaaS) and application service providers – none has garnered widespread acceptance as the central theme for how IT-related services can be delivered globally."

David Mitchell Smith: "The focus has moved up from the infrastructure implementations and onto the services that allow for access to the capabilities provided. Although many companies will argue how the cloud services are implemented, the ultimate measure of success will be how the services are consumed and whether that leads to new business opportunities."

David Cearley: "Gartner predicts that the impact of cloud computing on IT vendors will be huge. Established vendors have great presence in traditional software markets and as new Web 2.0 and cloud business models evolve and expand outside of consumer markets a great deal could change. "The vendors are at very different levels of maturity. The consumer-focused vendors are the most mature in delivering what Gartner calls a 'cloud/Web platform' from technology and community perspectives, but the business-focused vendors have rich business services and, at times, are very adept at selling business services."

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To complement our themes of Web 2.0 and cloud, we looked for keynote speakers who "get it." Here's a review of the latest book from one of our keynote speakers: Clay Shirky, NYU professor of new media and the Internet and author of "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations."

Want more? Check out Clay's Here Comes Everybody blog.

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Web 2.0 is more than a set of technologies. There are also the social and business dimensions. The Web is the underlying infrastructure and center of gravity that enables many recent additions to the IT lexicon and will remain so long after the next generations of buzzwords come and go. Innovation in the consumer markets is driving end users to deploy their own solutions. This has huge implications on support and compliance. Blogs and wikis introduce governance, risk and compliance issues. Social networks introduce privacy issues. Mashups introduce system performance and availability issues. IT must not take a "don't ask-don't tell" approach to these. Rather, IT should proactively work with their user organizations to introduce "just enough-just in time" controls for use of these technologies and approaches.

Cloud Computing: At the recent Gartner Emerging Trends Symposium ITxpo, analysts Daryl Plummer and Tom Bittman gave an overview of Cloud Computing, exploring both the myths and the real issues. If you missed the presentation, check this blog entry from Larry Dignan of TechRepublic. This sets the stage for the newer work that both Tom and Daryl will be presenting at the Web Innovation Summit. Daryl will discuss the Cloud Computing Scenario – how cloud computing will affect the strategy and direction of IT and business. Tom will focus on Virtualization and the Cloud - the best practices that will maximize user choices in sourcing alternatives.

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Hello, I'm Beth Ranney, and I would like to welcome you to this blog, focused on Gartner's upcoming Web Innovation Summit: Profiting from Web 2.0, SaaS and Cloud Computing. This Summit is in Los Angeles on September 15-17. For those of you who've never been to a Gartner Summit, you're in for an incredible experience. A team of 17 Gartner analysts will present their latest findings on the current state of Web 2.0, software as a service, cloud computing, the latest best practices and future challenges. In addition, there are keynote thought leaders who will bring their unique perspective on these topics as well as solution providers who will show how their products and services have met clients' needs.

Who is responsible for developing the agenda for these Summits? That would be our Gartner analyst chairs: Gene Phifer and David Smith. Gene, David and several other analysts on the team will be contributing to this blog through September. We welcome your comments, thoughts and general suggestions about ideas for the Fall Summit or anything else on your mind.

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Recent reports (for example, CNN 8/23/07, "Anarchy Online", and in September 2007 of New Scientist) raise the question of disruptive events in that virtual world by "griefers" and raise the question of whether Second Life is "doing enough to protect its members."

Another oft-cited example was the CNet interview, back in December 2006, with Anshe Chung (a strong female virtual world figure that is a lightning rod for some people's negative energy). I view that disruption as resulting from a lack of attention to basic security mechanisms (by CNet), analogous to an enterprise launching a public Web site from their corporate network without using a firewall. I have spent a bunch of time in SL over the past year and have never once run into a "griefer".

The SL system allows very quick-and-easy controls (takes a couple of seconds to check off an item in a dialog), which provide a range of security:

* you can restrict access to a location to only specific individuals, or to individuals who are members of a group (this is what we will be doing with the Gartner simulcast sessions in SL for Web Innovation Summit for more information on these SL simulcast sessions, click here)
* you can ban any individual from a parcel (if present, they are immediately ejected)
* you can disallow people from instantiating any kind of object on the parcel
* you can disallow people from flying over the property, or setting landmarks

These mechanisms seem pretty robust to me. I have not heard of anyone circumventing them, although, just as with network firewalls, there might be some little-publicized holes. However, if all else fails, one can always reboot the SIM.

Given the ability to button-down the security in an SL parcel, there remains a judgment call to be made by administrators regarding the degree of open-ness. This situation is analogous to allowing comments in a blog. Do you allow any person to add a comment and publish it immediately (and, if offensive, delete the comment after the fact)? Or do you add some prior restraint -- a degree of control, such as moderated comments, or only allowing comments by registered users? And if you have open comments, do you have automated filters and gateways such as Captchas? Likewise in SL, you can decide that the only people who will visit your parcel are those known to you, and you can control their behavior once they are on your land.

Some businesses in SL have to be open to anyone -- such as a store trying to sell goods to the public. Other locations do not have to be open. This is a decision driven by business objectives and not by limitations in the SL security model.

Rather than the specter of a lawless frontier, it seems to me that SL is heading very much away from the Wild West into a more ordered place. More and more landowners are choosing to implement controls such that it has become difficult for an unaffiliated person to fly through a SIM (you keep running into invisible walls at the boundary of locked-down parcels). There are more islands and other communities with their own covenants and administrators. Further, Linden Labs is in the process of adding a grid-wide third-party identity verification system, which some residents think is a long overdue improvement, and others think that it means the death of a free-wheeling culture.

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A question that we will explore at next week's Gartner Web Innovation Summit is: how does the new generation of social software change the dynamic between organizational structure and software architecture?

Some context is necessary to answer this question. A recurring concept in my presentations over the past two years is the notion that the "structure of a software system reflects, for better or worse the structure of the organization that built it". Although not widely known, this is not a new idea. It was first articulated in 1968 by Mel Conway, and is referred to as Conway's Law. A more cynical way to phrase this dictum is that enterprises with warped and dysfunctional organizational structures will often build systems that are similarly warped and dysfunctional.

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One of the great things about my new Gateway laptop is it's a powerful thing with lots of memory, so I don't mind taxing it to its limits. Primarily, I bought it for video editing, but I find it a great tool for staying abreast of everything (and I mean everything) that is happening in the world of media, technology, Web 2.0, etc. I have 11 feeds coming in across my screen, so as a former newspaper reporter, it's like having continuous streams of AP, UPI, Reuters making their way into my ongoing consciousness. Back in the day, there was one ticker in the newsroom and the content came in via tickertape…but I digress (and date myself).

Two of my favorite feeds are MoMB (Museum of Modern Beta) and Killerstartups.com. These two sites provide you an up-to-the-Internet moment compilation of companies who have just launched. I mean literally just launched. The point is, the array of new ideas—some good, some bad, some downright strange—shows that innovation is a compulsion that does not know the meaning of quit. Some folks are in it for the money; some are in it just because. Take one I just found: Vzaar, a company out of the UK that allows sellers to record short video clips of their products and link them to their eBay ad. That's a textbook mashup service that was created via eBay’s developers program by two former eBay employees.

At the Gartner Web Innovation Summit, I will be looking at how traditional media companies (aka incumbents) are struggling to fit innovation, especially Web 2.0 innovation, into their mindset and product sets. My presentation is 3 p.m. on Sept. 19th, titled "How Media Incumbents Can Embrace Web 2.0 to Survive and Thrive." Stop by and say hello

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If there is one thing the IT industry is famous for, it is hype. Web 2.0 is one of the biggest and most current examples. But as with all of these hyped terms, there comes a point when the search goes on for the next big thing. In the case of Web 2.0, the logical thing is Web 3.0. Or is it?

Although the Web 2.0 name is popular and represents the Web of today, the world does seem hungry for 3.0, whatever that is. While Web 2.0 suffered from being perhaps overly broad, the special interests driving 3.0-mania have the opposite problem – they are often too focused. Regardless of what the next big buzzword is, the Web will remain one of the major catalysts in technology and one of the major sources of innovation. That is why we are fond of saying "It's the Web, Stupid," which is the title of one of our keynotes. Co-chair Gene Phifer and I will present this Thursday morning at the conference.

During this session, we'll look at the future of the Web including the semantic web, the mobile web, the virtual world web and other candidates for "3.0." We hope to see you there!

What do you think?

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One of our fellow analysts, Tom Austin (who will be delivering the Web Innovation keynote with chairs David Smith and Gene Phifer), had the opportunity to hear David Weinberger speak at a recent conference. One of the key messages that Weinberger delivered was that sites, like Wikipedia, that let the readers draw their own conclusions by reading not just the content but also earlier versions, the discussions and the comments (and ratings) of others will be adjudged (perhaps) as more valuable than sites (he pointed at the NYTimes) that try to position themselves as the definitive authority, that acts to reinforce its authority and (tries to) dictate conclusions. The latter type of site is (in his opinion) going to decline dramatically

There is some wisdom in what he says but we believe that fundamentally, most people are lazy. They don't want to think about the answer and draw their own conclusion; they just want to know the authority's recommendation. This will be an Interesting item that we can debate.

There is a lot of interesting material in Weinberger's work so listening to him (as an authority figure? or just as a stimulus to thinking about the issues and drawing one's own conclusions?) should be very interesting.

Weinberger’s keynote will be on Friday, September 23 at 8:30 am. The conference opening keynote will be at 8:30 on Wednesday, September 19th.

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Web 2.0 continues to be a huge topic of interest among Gartner clients. They want to know what it is, how does it deliver value, what is safe, and how they can adopt it in their enterprises. Our clients typically focus on the applications of Web 2.0, like blogs, wikis, folksonomies and social networks. They also ask about Web 2.0 methodologies like Ajax and REST/POX.

What they don’t ask about often are some of the potentially highest value of Web 2.0: the aspects of participation and communities, the social and cultural implications, and the new business models and practices. These are the breakthrough benefits of Web 2.0, and enterprises must look at the applications and methodologies of Web 2.0 as a means toward these ends.

The Gartner Web Innovation Summit will do just that. In addition to Web 2.0, we will examine a broader array of Web-oriented topics, including Web architectures and virtual worlds. We hope to see you there.

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Get in the game! Your end-users are using new Web 2.0 tools in their work or at home. Your competitors are experimenting with the possibilities offered by emerging Web technologies. So find out how to make your Web infrastructure a real source of innovation, where people can communicate, share information and make better decisions.

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The Web Innovation Summit is a new Summit for Gartner. We will explore how emerging Web technologies and business and social models can be used to open up growth opportunities, deliver enhanced agility, and improve interactions with employees, suppliers and consumers. This is however, not just another Web 2.0 conference. The focus is on helping enterprises make sense and adopt Web technologies, methodologies and mindsets effectively for them. The Web Innovation Summit will also explore best practice usage of traditional Web technologies and current hot topics like Software as a Service, Rich Internet Applications (using Ajax and plug-ins), mobility, mashups, and the overall user experience.

Gartner Web Innovation Summit
19-21 September 2007
Las Vegas, NV
Register now!

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