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Internetnews.com editors provide an early roadmap for tech's direction in 2007.

Consulting the Oracle for Web 2.0's future

Oracle is like IBM in that it sees revenue opportunities in the cards for enterprise mashups. The company earlier this year unveiled and just rolled out WebCenter Suite to customers.

A new feather in its Fusion Middleware cap, the suite uses Web 2.0 software services, such as wikis and mashups, to help corporate employees better work together.

Ted Farrell, vice president and chief architect for Oracle's development tools, said WebCenter Suite comes from elements that customers traditionally found in portal engines and hooked them into other applications.

The result is a mashup that is altogether smarter than a traditional application of singular purpose.

"If I have purchase orders, and I have a portlet that shows them, I can drop them into a page, but all I can do is view the PO but can't get at the functionality," Farrell said. "The goal [with WebCenter] is to get the end user the information they need to act on the information they see."

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Farrell offered another scenario. Suppose a corporate employee in finance has question about an expense report that was filed.

Today, we fire off an e-mail and hope for a quick response. But he may be out or traveling, so it takes longer to get the information necessary to make a decision about the expense report.

With WebCenter Suite, the finance employee has access to presence because the disparate applications are all communicating with one another in a mashup-type arrangement.

He could see whether someone is online through either instant messaging or mobile phone, click a button to set up an IM chat or even talk to him via "click-to-dial" VoIP services to ask him a question that may lead to approving or declining the expense report.

"Throwing wikis and blogs on a page is easy," Farrell said. "It's about getting your enterprise info in that same modular form, and letting you decide and filter the types of information you want."

Web 2.0: The New Wild, Wild West?

Gartner's Phifer said a lot can happen in Web 2.0 in the next year. After all, the industry has heard nary a peep from Microsoft regarding blogs, wikis and mashups.

But you can bet it's planning something, and Phifer said the notion that Microsoft may sell mashups as traditional software packages is not out of the realm of possibility.

True, Microsoft promises to deliver more software on demand through its Windows Live offerings, but it is still the leader in packaged apps.

Who is to say the mashup has to remain a Web-based offering? More generally, what will define the intersection of Web 2.0 and the enterprise market?

For now, there are more questions than answers.

"Everybody keeps telling me: 'I get the techie part of it, but where's the business angle on mashups?'" IBM's Gisolfi said. "I keep telling them we're not going to answer questions about this until we build some validation, and we're trying to build a community for that purpose."

According to Farrell, the answer could be very simple. "The real power is figuring out how to take what you have rather than starting from scratch, and applying new tech to it."

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