Web 2.0 tools influence expectations

SAP, a company known for its back-end enterprise resource planning software, is starting to pay much closer attention to the front-end user interface through which customers will access information, reports IT Business.

The head of the company's new business user development unit, Doug Merritt, says consumers have started experimenting with tagging, social networking sites and other Web 2.0 tools that influence their expectations of IT in the workplace. "People running the day-to-day activities of an organisation are demanding the same level of empowerment," he adds.

SAP is not alone in exploring what some are calling "enterprise 2.0" applications, but so far CIOs and other top executives have been slower to recognise their value, according to industry experts.

Large Australian enterprises, including the Commonwealth Bank, the Australian Taxation Office, and the South Australian government, have thrown their weight behind a nationwide virtualisation project by their primary outsourcer EDS, reports Computer World.

EDS stands to save millions by rolling out a massive 10 500-server rationalisation project for its clients in Australia and New Zealand. The project is six months into its three-year timeline, which will see the entire fleet of Unix servers spread across eight data centres in Australia and New Zealand, converted into a rationalised environment.

The project is expected to save the company 65% in hardware, cut costs in power and cooling, and drop support and licensing costs.

Although large commercial vendors made early strides into the market for service-oriented architecture (SOA) software, open source components are rapidly finding their way into the picture, reports eWeek.

Vendors such as Iona Technologies, Red Hat, MuleSource, WSO2, Sun Microsystems and even IBM are pushing open source components as key pieces of SOA implementations.

To solidify its move into the open source SOA world, Iona acquired LogicBlaze in April. Now the company will show off the fruits of that acquisition, on 9 July, with several new initiatives designed to give customers the products, services and support programmes - as well as opportunities for community participation - required to successfully incorporate open source technology into SOA deployments, said Eric Newcomer, CTO of Iona.