Corporate America wakes up to Web 2.0

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He noted that the adoption of blogs, wikis and social software within business applications is in its early days but he sees potential for them to take hold slowly.

"The reason I find enterprise 2.0 fundamentally interesting and novel is because we're building a platform that allows us to build structure over time," McAfee said.

Seely Brown said that ultimately, businesses should combine state-of-the-art Web technologies to engender collaboration among end users with a back-end service-oriented architecture.

The combination of Web 2.0 tools popular with end users and more flexible, IT-controlled systems will give businesses a collaborative system that can grow over time, he said.

"These Web 2.0 systems have a fundamental point of view, which is to keep it small. But think about an architecture that will allow people to add and make it more useful over time," he said.

Collaboration software companies, meanwhile, will need to decide how far they want to go in reworking their products to support emerging Web standards, said Scott Dietzen, chief technology officer of Zimbra, one of several start-ups building e-mail and collaboration applications.

Since releasing its first product last year, Zimbra has benefited from the awareness of consumer Web technologies, Dietzen said.

"We expect (technology adoption) to work very much like Web 1.0, which was consumer-led in the earliest days until pretty quickly businesses picked up on what they were missing out on," he said.

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