5 Disruptive Technologies To Watch In 2007 - News by InformationWeek

5 Disruptive Technologies To Watch In 2007 - News by InformationWeek: "In 2006, we saw more buzzwords describing the 'Webification' of the enterprise. Software-as-a-service (SaaS), mashups, Web 2.0, RSS feeds, Wikis, blogs, the rewritable Web, social networking spaces, group chat rooms -- no matter which aspect you're talking about, clearly something new is happening here. The trick is paying attention, because the Web services movement is producing better and more capable enterprise class applications, which can be deployed in a fraction of the time that more traditional apps took.

IT managers are using the combinations of various Web-based applications to piece together what they need done. For example, you can now take a mapping service such as Yahoo or Google Maps and tie in the location of your current sales leads to determine where to deploy your sales force. Many of these begin with one or more hosted applications and build from there. For some leading-edge examples, look at Zimbra for hosting enterprise-class e-mail, Amazon's S3 for offsite disk storage, basecamp.com for project management, Concur for expense reporting, and Jive Software's Clearspace for document and workflow management. All mix multiple applications using well-known, and, in most cases, open-source code. "