Judith Hurwitz, an authority all things enterprise IT, has been pondering the implications of the Web 2.0 phenomenon, and hears some echoes of 1999. Namely, there’s a large number of Web 2.0 companies entering the market with plenty of venture capital but no sustainable business models.

That’s the potential downside. However, Web 2.0 has some interesting implications for internal enterprise deployments — that is, the social networking and collaborative applications that are part of Web 2.0 may help assure the success of service-oriented architecture. “Web 2.0 completes one of the key components of a service-oriented architecture – the interactive presentation and collaboration services,” Hurwitz wrote in her company newsletter. “In fact, this will be one of the foundational ways that customers will create collaborative composite applications.”

Web 2.0 has a number of qualities that can speed along SOA projects: the ability to have Web pages continuously refresh, leveraging the XML-based Ajax development platform to support iterative client development, the ability to create Web applications without server interactions or dependencies, and the ability to link components together into mashups, or client-driven composite applications.

Hurwitz predicts that Web 2.0 will ultimately shake up the stodgy enterprise environment. “One of the impacts of Web 2.0 is that it begins to turn the balance of power upside down,” she writes. “It enables emerging companies without a vast infrastructure to begin to create compelling software that can appear on the Web. This will be aided by the emerging business model of Web 2.0 – short development cycles where the community provides feedback to the developers.”

IONA’s Steve Vinoski also connected the dots between Web 2.0 and SOA, observing that the key to successful SOA does not lie in the technical aspects of the services, but in the organizational impetus behind the creation and support of those services — “the social side of services.”

Organizational barriers — from turf protection at lower levels of the company to bottom-line thinking at higher levels — can stymie even the best SOAs. SOA success is more than “getting services up and running and letting them interact via a registry,” Vinsoski wrote in IEEE Internet Computing. “The problem is that service networks are, and will be for the foreseeable future, created by people, rather than by the services themselves. If you want to succeed with SOA, you have to work the human side of the equation. Otherwise, all the technology in the world won’t help you.”

Enter Web 2.0. Vinoski suggests employing wikis and blogs to help sell SOA to the rest of the organization. A wiki, or Website that enables collaborative authoring, and a Weblog can serve as “powerful Web-based socialization tools that can help you build the shared vision needed for SOA to take root,” he writes.vWikis and Weblogs can be used to help describe your ideas for SOA adoption, provide use cases from other companies, and help build an SOA constituency within your organization, Vinoski said.