Dion Hinchcliffe writes a great post with 8 predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2009. He got my attention immediately with that title, and much of what he had to say is relevant to what we’re doing at Helpstream, so I wanted to comment on the specifics as they relate to us.

SOA isn’t really dead: Some have predicted that SOA has been eclipsed by mashups, BPM, SaaS, Cloud Computing, and all other architectural approaches that depend on “services”. But I agree with Dion that it’s far from dead. In fact, we see quite a bit of it at Helpstream and have used it to good effect to make customers and partners happier. For example, we offer integrated products that work with both Oracle and Salesforce.com’s Customer Service solutions to add value through community. We are frequently asked to integrate our system with existing CRM systems, for example to make sure that the account records and logons are kept in sync. SOA is really quite valuable, and SaaS can make it easier than ever to deliver.

Dion predicts little progress in Enterprise Search: It’s very hard to make all the data inside your firewall as accessible as all the data on the web that can be found by Google. Yet nowhere is this more important than when doing Customer Service and Help Desk applications. “Need the 411,” is exactly what we’re all about. And internally, our answer to the search conundrum is to use our own product to break down the silos. Every slideshow, research paper, schedule, or other piece of important information goes into our system as a Knowledge Base article. Important discussions that involve real collaboration are held in the forums of our system rather than in the email silo where they’ll be easier to find and access later. We’re a small organization and not an Enterprise, but we know of Enterprises that are using our system for exactly this kind of thing too. Imagine a large public data center networking solutions company that uses are product as a total sales information portal. All of their sales people, SE’s, product managers, and other interested parties use it as a collaboration and information sharing hub. It works extremely well for that purpose and solves a problem that leads to real bottom line results through better selling.

Tight budgets drive low-cost Web 2.0 and cloud/SaaS solutions: Absolutely. We’ve seen an uptick in momentum for exactly this reason. And, we’re demonstrating real ROI using community to help answer Customer Service questions. In our upcoming Winter09 release, every customer will have an out-of-the-box waterfall dashboard that shows how many incidents are being handled by the Knowledge Base, Community, or direct Customer Service interaction through cases so they can monitor their progress.

Online community and 2.0 technologies become a priority for most organizations: Check again. The diversity of customers who are interested in these technologies is large. But, to really reach the largest markets requires vendors to be able to show real ROI. For the longest time these applications were mostly about being “hip” on the web. That’s not good enough in this economy. As described above, Helpstream not only has a real ROI, but we can report on the savings you’re getting right in the application.

Cloud Computing will remain one of the biggest new Internet developments: As you have probably heard by now, Helpstream recently moved all operations out of our own datacenter and into the Amazon Cloud. It’s been a great move for us. There’s been some great coverage of our move from other bloggers if you’d like to know more about it.

Internal use of 2.0 will continue growth in large enterprises while the struggle continues with market-facing 2.0 products: This has been true for a long time, but it need not continue to be true. The problem many organizations have faced is that their deployment of 2.0 technologies has not resulted in what we call “destination” communities. Users did not have strong enough reasons to want to participate, in other words. It’s like a mall store you’d never go to unless you had to be at the mall to visit an anchor tenant. We have found that Customer Service is a real Destination Community. When people need help, they will participate. If they like the experience, they will be back. If your organization wants to build a community, start with Customer Service.

Massive changes in the business landscape create new 2.0 business opportunities: We like to think of the web in terms of a channel. The massive business changes will accelerate the long term trend to move more business into the web channel because it is cheaper, and because it is more social and collaborative than competing channels like the telephone. How would you know if the web is your channel? Use the telephone as an analogy. If, through some bizarre series of events, your business lost all ability to use the telephone ever again, nearly 100% of businesses would be crippled by that. The same is not yet true of the web, but it is coming. If yours is a company that would be crippled by the web, you’d better ask yourself just how good a job you’re doing using the web.

Do you provide a conventional Customer Service solution with just a Knowledge Base and a little Case submission? That’d be like saying the only way you can use the telephone is to have a number with an answering machine you check the messages on. Yes, it’s useful, but you aren’t tapping the potential of the channel.

Get a Community-based Customer Service solution like Helpstream and unlock the full potential of the Web Channel. You don’t even have to replace your old solution. We’ve integrated our application with Oracle and Salesforce so if you’re using one of those products we can bring you the full Web Channel today.