ISVs and the Emerging Web

"What the <2.0> should we be thinking?"  This is the common reaction that we sense from our customers and partners discussing the high level opportunities presented by Web 2.0 and the emerging web in the context of opportunities to enhance their business functions. In spite of the increasing levels of excitement, it is also a subject with very little consensus. How do you as an ISV get started on materializing such opportunities to evolve your offerings in the context of winning & serving your target customers?

Materializing these opportunities will require ISVs to develop a sound understanding of the emerging web ecosystem to evaluate the implications and opportunities in the context of their current and future investments. A wide spread understanding for the emerging web is non-existent today. Web 2.0 applications and services are largely viewed today as ad-hoc investments undertaken by social web start-ups initiated by ambitious college kids. The first generation of social Web 2.0 start-ups have emerged and we are now in the early days of the second generation comprising the next wave of web start-ups and forward looking Enterprises/Businesses looking to ride the Web 2.0 wave. There exists a tremendous opportunity for ISVs of packaged/white labeled products today to embrace the emerging web and deliver services for their existing customers while extending reach to new and potentially untapped users.

Why not incorporate these capabilities into your application? The Platform Architect Team recently released a Web 2.0 service development starter kit with resources (presentations, white papers, sample application built using the ASP.NET MVC framework) that provides an overview of the emerging web and drill into the aspects of planning, architecting, and implementing services for the emerging web. This is a useful collection of resources for ISVs to get to speed with the emerging web trends and obtain an overview of planning, architecting, and implementing services for the emerging web.  You can watch this video to obtain an overview of the kit. The kit can be downloaded from here.

We look forward to hearing about your Web 2.0 initiatives and development experiences!

Karthik Ravindran & Masashi Narumoto

Microsoft Platform Architect Team