Ok, so we’ve all been immersed this last year with buzzwords like AJAX and overstated speculations of Web 2.0 becoming the tidal wave that the original Internet gold rush was in the late 90’s. I admit that I approached this buzz with far more caution than last time around; and waded gently into the waters until there was enough understanding of the technology to make it actually gain viable traction. In other words, I didn’t want to be AJAX to be AJAX, I wanted to figure out how to leverage the functionality beyond just cool bells and whistles.

The dust is far from settling on the 2.0 uprising, but I thought it time to take off the water wings and dive into the deep end. As some of you know, I’m the CEO/Owner of the Business Intelligence Software company Latigent. We provide ETL and Reporting/Analytics/Dashboard software primarily to the Call Center space. I spend a great deal of time watching market trends and understanding what things like AJAX and Open Source mean to our ever changing industry.

But as importantly, I spend a lot of time with our customers and prospective customers understanding not only how they currently use our software, but how they WILL use our software but don’t know it yet. I then try to forecast the point in time when the two intersect and back that into our product development road maps.

It’s not a crystal ball by any means, but the basic premise is to figure out when people will start asking to see "AJAX" or "Web 2.0" functionality in our software. Furthermore I have to predict what pieces they will want to see, how they will use them, and how much they will be willing to pay for them.

Now, most people won’t actually ask for AJAX or Web 2.0 by name; they probably won’t ask for open source directly either, but they may ask about open source or our support for open source platforms such as Linux and MySQL.

What they will ask for, however, are the capabilities afforded by Web 2.0; things like better ways to collaborate and share information, richer interfaces and open standards.

Latigent has actually been leveraging AJAX for almost a year now to provide a richer interface to our customers. Our customers love it, and our prospects love the look of it. Interesting enough, not one of them ever has asked how we do it, or asked "hey are you using AJAX?" My point you ask?

If we truly want to speed-up the adoption rate of Web 2.0 we have start translating the cloud into tangible benefits that the rest of the world can understand and identify with, and in some cases slide it in subtly.

In future posts, I will discuss how all of this ties into the Business Intelligence space. I’ll also dissect what most people refer to as the "BI Stack" and frame-up what  Business Intelligence 2.0 will look like, how it will take form, and how we sell it to the Enterprise.