Any sanguine observer of web trends and technology generally could not be blamed for rolling their eyes at yet another Web 2.0 corporate initiative. But give us a second to explain. For regarding Web 2.0 - all hype aside -- there really is something worth talking about here. First, it doesn't really matter if you call Web 2.0, Internet 2.0, or the "next next" thing. What the meaning behind the term, whatever term, suggests is that we have reached a common milestone in the development of Internet related technologies generally, and digital media technologies specifically (of particular interest to Artesia, Open Text's Digital Media Group) that taken together enable a fundamentally different approach to putting together large complex systems. Scott Bowen, President of Artesia, talks more about this in our latest podcast launched this week.

It wasn't of course a particular day or time, a specific invention or product, but rather taken writ large we have entered a period of modularity where interoperability and flexibility are as important, if not more so, than sheer functionality (can we do it at all) or performance (yeah we can do it but it takes a week). Where once streaming audio over the Internet was a feat, today video delivered over IP is common place whether online or as part of a service providers infrastructure.

Here at Open Text we're excited about the opportunities these trends present. First our flagship Digital Asset Management product is being used in more and different use cases. Where once perhaps just a very nice and very important virtual filing cabinet, today it is rare where a customer doesn't integrate its enterprise DAM with other systems ranging from online ecommerce systems to backend financial and billing infrastructures. Robust public APIs of course are the secret sauce - the LegosTM of the digital world. Our latest version, Artesia DAM 6.8, for example, shipped with a full complement of web services that have been used to extend the system's core functionality in many directions from large file delivery to web content management integration. We'll be expanding this set of web services even further with future releases and, in fact, are the very method we are using to integrate other products from the Open Text suite including the Business Process server which will make heretowith one-off process changes easy to recreate, re-use, and modify as the situation fits.

Secondly, Web 2.0 means we can build, test, configure, and support our product differently and we expect even more robustly than ever before. Where once DAM was something of an art with custom implementations the norm, over the years our team and the associated technologies have matured such that today we have a standard client services methodology and a range of delivery options from fully integrated behind-the-firewall enterprise DAM to a completely hosted "Artesia On Demand" for which no local IT-infrastructure is required.

So Web 2.0, surely it's been hyped, but don't let the hype distract you from the significant technical trends it represents.