In a series of blog posts, Shai Agassi has taken up the subject of enterprise software, the third generation. Shai approaches his subject from a very different angle from what we are talking about here as “Enterprise 2.0,” but obviously there is much to think about in juxtaposing the perspectives. This is essential reading.

In his first post, Shai “looked at the following four layers in the stack: Store, Compute, Messaging, Presentation” and saw the following characteristics for the new generation:

Storage moves to some combination of Network Storage (think S3) in combination with in-memory stores

Compute will be disrupted on the server by cloud computing (which is an evolution to higher level of distributed than C/S) together with local grids as represented by appliances.

Networks will move from packets to events – in a sense sending business objects around, with the network aware of the content and able to route them using local enterprise bus that understand the relationships between roles and resources using rules.

Finally on the client side we will see smarter browsing – able to scale up the experience and fit the experience to the user and the content. At the same time, mobile clients with higher fidelity of experience but lower level of resources (screen and keyboard) will overtake the role of the desktop as the dominant platforms for user interaction.

More interesting, he says, is the question “what meaningful new experiences do you get from these innovations when they come together.”

Comments and his follow-up post make this a very lively and important conversation. Check it out.