Ann All spoke with Coach Wei, founder and former CEO of Nexaweb, a provider of Enterprise Web 2.0 solutions that enable companies to deploy richer, thinner, faster applications over the Web. A finalist in the 1999 MIT $50K entrepreneurship competition and holder of several U.S. patents, Wei also maintains a blog.

All: There seems to be a great deal of discussion lately of how, if at all, Enterprise 2.0 differs from Web 2.0, or indeed if there is even such a thing as Enterprise 2.0. Do you think that perhaps folks are getting too caught up in the debate and/or turned off by it that they fail to investigate the opportunities that may be there for their businesses?
Wei: To a large degree, when we're describing what the term Web 2.0 means to the enterprise, we are talking about things they can do that they could not do before or things they can do more easily and cost-consciously than before. I think there is a little bit of confusion because people are starting to appropriate the phrase, so more and more you're hearing things like, "Marketing 2.0."

I personally believe that Web 2.0 represents a very fundamental shift. With Web 1.0, we were just getting to know the Internet and figuring out how to use it. But now we are seeing SOA, mashups and rich Internet applications. I believe this shift will be matched in importance only by the shift from the mainframe to a client-server architecture.

All: Do you have any suggestions for companies that are trying to determine which emerging technologies, if any, make sense for their business?
Wei: I have one suggestion for when you are looking at moving Web 2.0 technologies to the enterprise. Never lose sight of what Web 2.0 is fundamentally about: It's about integration and about interaction — helping your employees interact better with data, with processes and with each other. There are quite a few things in the context of Web 2.0 that can help companies do this. For instance, a lot of companies are talking about SOA. The emerging set of products and services that we call mashups can make it easier to integrate and consume an SOA. So it's about making things simpler.

All: What are the key challenges that the typical company may have to overcome to implement emerging technologies that fall under the Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 umbrella? And what are some ways they can meet those challenges?
Wei: The biggest challenge I have seen is the complexity of the existing IT landscape. Too often it has many different tiers, with many different products and vendors. Just to understand it is a big challenge. So I highly recommend that companies establish a reference architecture they can use as a guideline or blueprint. If you are not sure where a Web 2.0 technology may fit into your enterprise, the blueprint will help you look at it from a systems standpoint.