Should Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 be blended into one single category? Since the parade of Web 2.0 technologies has come to the fore, they have been mainly a consumer or business-to-consumer play, and have only tantalized the enterprise side. Web 2.0 is seen as an untamed frontier, open to all, an innovation a minute. By the way, that’s the complete opposite of the approaches of cautious, security-minded, five-year-budget-cycled enterprise IT managers.

If history is a teacher, then it seems inevitable that Web 2.0 will begin to seep into every nook and cranny of the enterprise, just as PCs, Internet computing, and mobile devices did in years gone by. And, there is already plenty of seepage going on — many corporations have blogs and wikis by the score to help their workers collaborate better.

But the real test will be the higher-level mechanisms of Web 2.0 — Software as a Service and mashups. Anshu Sharma, for one, feels that in the long run, Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 are one in the same.

If applied right, enterprise end users should be able to benefit from rich applications that are built and used, simply, with Web 2.0 tools and approaches. “The idea of Enterprise 2.0 seems inside-out to me,” he said in a recent post. “People from the enterprise world used to large ERP-style applications and deployments thinking in traditional terms with a willingness to tweak the model to incorporate 2.0 from Web 2.0. This will not suffice. The square (pun intended) peg of enterprise software will not fit into the round hole (no pun intended) of Web 2.0.”

The trouble has historical roots, Anshu continues. “Slapping a portal on top of client-server software helped SIs and vendors make some money but they were no competition for applications designed from the ground up for the Web. A lot of companies are now trying to do the same by trying to ’service-orient’ their existing applications. I find the tone of discussion on Enterprise 2.0 suffering from the same problem.”

Anshu provides a working definition of Enterprise 2.0, which — surprise, surprise — is the exact definition of Web 2.0. SaaS, he says, is where the enterprise intersects with Web 2.0. “I would argue that all Web 2.0 applications are hosting-capable if not entirely hosted,” Ansu says. “The benefits of the long tail come into effect only when you have large number of users and but for a few very large companies it is hard to see how this effect will play out if the application is not hosted.”

Enterprise 2.0 mashups will be the same thing as Web 2.0 mashups. In the enterprise, SOA and Web services help expose internal applications for this type of integration, Anshu says. He provides an excellent example of such a mashup in action:

“You are browsing a catalog in your procurement application. As you mouse over the price, a bubble pops up (AJAX style) to tell you whether this is within your purchasing authority. This is a mashup of procurement and financials.”

“If Enterprise 2.0 looks, feels and behaves like Web 2.0 then why is it so hard?” Anshu asked, then answers is own question: “It is not hard.” The pain points in this process, he points out, are within the “existing enterprise applications that will in five years be legacy, just as client-server applications became legacy and mainframe apps before that.”