Businesses failing to invest in Web 2.0, says BEA

Businesses are failing to invest in Web 2.0 technologies owing to a lack of understanding of business benefits among senior management.

In the survey of 320 respondents in seven European countries from BEA, 23% of respondents were concerned about how they would regulate content, as user-generated content was seen as one of the hallmarks of Web 2.0 by 20% of respondents.

BEA said Web 2.0 technologies provide organisations with the ability to radically change how they interact with their customers, dramatically improving service levels and consequently increasing sales. The other key reasons cited for deploying Web 2.0 are improved employee collaboration (cited by 31% of respondents) and the opportunity to create an easier interface with partners and suppliers (cited by 28%).

Web services, such as the programming interfaces Google provides, were cited as the main technology driving demand for Web 2.0 by 38% of respondents, as it provides a way of linking systems together and automating business processes.

The survey also found that the demand for mashups, where a website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience, was set to treble from its current level of 6% of organisations to 18% within 18 months.