You have read the white papers, seen the blogs, attended the conferences. And you have bought into the hype.

Enterprise 2.0 tools are going to make your organization an innovation machine! I actually believe that's true. Or, at least, I think they can go a long way to getting you there.

So, now what do you do? How do you get there from here. You can fight with your IT department. Get buy in from the whole world and his dog. Literally buy a web server that is installed in a rack somewhere within your company's data center. You can set up Apache. Set up MySQL. You can install the long dreamed about Wiki.

It'll take a while.

Or, you can go the SaaS route and try to get your company security people to "Get it" about using a product from small web company. You data will be on their servers. If your data is financially related, or perhaps includes medical information, you will have to reassure yourself that they have both the systems security to protect the data and the, more importantly, the internal processes to protect your data.

There is another.... way

Or, you can go over to a virtual appliance directory like the one at VMware and find a virtual appliance that includes your SocialText Wiki. You download it, find a Cloud Computing Vendor, and install it. The virtual appliance includes everything you need. Web server, database.

Virtual Appliances + Cloud Computing = Hybrid SaaS

You get all the security and control of running an application within your own environment, but you get the flexibility to fire it up and try it with just a few individuals or a small department without having to go through the political BS of getting IT to buy off on every single element of your Enteprise 2.0 vision.

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference

Today, Steve Wylie, who is putting together the
Enterprise 2.0 Boston 2008 conference asked if Cloud Computing should be considered as part of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference.

I think it should. Offerings like Joyent's Cloud Computer are already being used by small businesses, large companies and everything in between as an infrastructure to develop and deploy new solutions. These solutions often begin as experimental applications that emerge into major mission critical components of successful innovative new business offers.

Enterprise 2.0 is emergence software, and Cloud Computing is a great way of enabling that.