So last week I went to the BEA World 2006 Conference in San Francisco. Here are some thoughts:
- I am not the biggest fan of enterprise software– especially dense, IDE-ish, huge-learning-curve stuff, but I was excited about where they were going
- Basically, they are going into the Enterprise 2.0 direction, baking in the tools and attitudes of the Web 2.0 world
- Their three main products in this realm are mentioned in this press release from a while ago— Runner is a way to publish cool ALUI apps to the internet (instead of inpenetrable portals), Holland/ Builder is a wiki where you can drag/drop all sorts of enterprise-y elements like a Siebel record or a machine maintenance item into a wiki page and talk about it, and Graffiti is basically tags
- Graffiti has the biggest brass-tacks potential, as it completely changes the search mechanism inside ALUI
- It’s exciting to see these worlds– flexible, easy-to-use, webby world and the dense, high-security-model, months-long development worlds– come together
One last bit:
I had a Twilight Zone moment in one session when two IT guys from a pharmaceutical company got up and talked about "IT Governance". The main thrust of their prideful presentation was that they had a system for deleting documents from their intranet that did not meet a subscribed level of popularity.
Deleting. Documents that scientists found valuable enough to post. Because the document had not received alot of hits in a three month period. That’s not exactly long tail-ish, is it? There is much work to do.