Now even the core technnology companies like Oracle are joining the Social Networking and Web 2.0 bandwagon with an enterprise twist to their offerings.

In today’s Oracle OpenWorld, they provided a sneak-peek into the Social dimension and mash-up like applications that they are going to support in their next-gen “Fusion” release. Following is a quote from Ed Abbo, senior VP at oracle:

Traditionally, software companies design around hierarchical organizations, but many interactions are more social in nature… If you are trying to close a sales deal, you form communities, finds references in the customers base, go to a business partner and bring them into the opportunity and get product people involved. That social aspect is not well modeled in systems today. A lot is done over email…

Here is another quote from Thomas Kurian, senior vice president of Oracle Server Technologies that gives some insights into their enterprise 2.0 plan:

Oracle’s Enterprise 2.0 vision is to bring capabilities users are familiar with, like wikis, blogs, RSS, discussion forums, social networks to enterprise applications using a standards-based programming model that allows you to mix and match services with information systems

They demonstrated a few Widgets/Mashups built using Google Gadgets api that can be added to personalized portals like iGoogle to illustrate their “Social CRM” concept. Oracle is also going to support Google’s OpenSocial platform in an effort to what they call “making business more social”.

I think the bigger challenge for the firms willing to adopt web/enterprise 2.0 is not so much the lack of technology, but the mindset that people often have about these kinds of technologies since so far they have mostly been used for building “fun” apps. But on the positive note, involvement of big players like Oracle and IBM that we have recently seen in this field would definitely help change this mindset.