Today, Web 2.0 has changed the way modern businesses are conducting, using the Internet as a platform. Shankar Krishnamoorthy, CTO and Co-founder of Aspire Systems shares his experiences on Web 2.0 in an interview with Sharath Kumar, CIOL. Excerpts.

CIOL: How far has Web 2.0 influenced modern businesses?

SHANKAR KRISHNAMOORTY: Web 2.0 brings in more customer participation in doing the business. If you are in product development, customers can take part in building the product they want much ahead in the development cycle. If you look at classical engineering methodologies, you talk to the customer, get their input, build the product and release it to them. In this mode, customer gets the chances either at the beginning or at the end of the cycle. However, with Web 2.0, you involve the customers throughout the development cycle and shape the product according to their needs. Your customers will get an opportunity to give feedback and also test the waters on newer features.

This can be done through wikis, collaboration tools, surveys, online broadcasts/podcasts, etc. These Web 2.0 tools help the modern business to collaborate and participate more.

CIOL: Your company is involved in product lifecycle services. Can you explain your own experiences with Web 2.0?

SK: Our experience involves on two folds:

a) Building Web 2.0 features into the products that we build. Several products that we have built in the past two years have Ajax incorporated. Users get very good desktop-like experience while using Ajax.

b) Using Web 2.0 for our project execution and marketing communication. We use Web 2.0 extensively for collaboration. In fact, www.producteering.org is a site built and promoted for producteers by producteers. This site has lot of Web 2.0 features. Aspire has built and promoted this site.

COIL: Knowledge sharing becomes easy with Web 2.0. However, some companies might not want to share their internal knowledge for reasons of competition, not even within the whole company. Do you see a change happening?

SK: Knowledge sharing is governed by ‘how the sharing helps in fostering knowledge and also how it helps each other’s work’. If knowledge is just shared for the sake of educating each other, that initiative will not last long. When knowledge sharing is really beneficial from solving problems perspective, it gets different dimension. More people would like to share and re-use knowledge.

While Web 2.0 makes it easy to share knowledge, ‘what can be shared’ purely depends on the nature of business. We have built two knowledge-sharing platforms inside our company – Seventh Sense and Aspireforge. The first one is used for sharing knowledge on the lessons learnt, case studies, training materials, etc. AspireForge is for reusable components.

Both platforms help our people in sharing knowledge. However, we do not allow our people to put customer specific materials in these platforms. This measure is to protect our customer IPs.

CIOL: What does Web 2.0 mean for SMBs? Is it an affordable technology?

SK: Absolutely. I would answer it in two ways:

It is affordable by SMBs. There is no major cost involved other than whatever they are currently spending. Two, there are lot of open source tools available to board onto Web 2.0 – wordpress, mediawiki, pbwiki, etc. Putting together a Web 2.0 platform is actually an easy one. It is an affordable technology.

The major requirement in putting this Web 2.0 platform is the ability to drive the cultural change. This goes all the way from handling customer complaints, listening to customer feedback and responding back quickly, etc.

CIOL: Do you anticipate a major shift in corporate culture by adopting Web 2.0?

SK: Yes. There will be a shift in corporate culture. Corporates tend to become more agile and faster in responding compared to classical ways of execution. Again, let us take an example of product development.

The entire world is moving towards shorter development life cycle, more involvement of customers, etc., That means, you start with a feature development, complete it in two weeks, and release it to the end users to get their feedback. This two-week development brings in a different approach and makes the teams more agile.