The new year is proceeding with what appears to be a renaissance or perhaps mini-bubble in the global IT industry. Use of the technically imprecise but no doubt seductive term "Web 2.0" is stimulating companies to think through what they need to deploy for and through their websites in ways unimaginable in the dark days of a few years ago.

Within this Web 2.0 context lies the emerging reality of open source software: its proponents, its political aspects, its communities, and most of all, its myriad downloads in myriad versions.

Although open source "threatens" to take away as much as 20 percent of the market within a few years, according to numerous sources, the fact is that open source is a mere reflection of an increasingly vibrant industry. Whether out of fear, expediency, or leadership, IBM continues to dance on the open source bandwagon with both feet, its most recent effort being what appeared to be a hasty assemblage of companies under the "Open AJAX" coalition, thus confirming its acknowledgement that open source is here to stay.

And is open source really the threat that many say it is? Probably not. Anecdotal evidence that I've collected suggests that many open source developers are independents, albeit often working on contracts for companies, who would otherwise be unemployed independents who cannot or refuse to buy high-priced software development tools. These independents are downloading open source software instead of buying nothing. Their market share is not being stolen from the proprietary environments.

Yet, once they get into companies and start to design and deploy applications, they end up influencing the purchase of numerous other IT goods and services, bringing a net gain to the overall market. And often, they end up interacting with, i.e., their projects end up interoperating with, many complex applications and infrastructures that are decidedly high-budget, thereby adding another net gain to the overall industry.

IBM, by positioning itself squarely in the open source arena while simultaneously dominating the traditional web services market through WebSphere, is one of the few companies that can have it both ways, and serve the entire spectrum of application development and administration. As one recent software executive pointed out to me, "you know, after all this, 70 percent of all the data in the world is still on mainframes."

There are still truly mission-critical issues and applications that cannot be cobbled together in any sort of loose way, but rather require the highest levels of tight integration and security. At the same time, there are terabytes of data on these big systems that need to be pushed outward. Squaring this circle is the crux of the challenge.

The IT world, as with the world in general, is a different place than it was in the late '90s, and a seemingly more complex one. Who would have thought in 1999 that we would one day be yearning for those simpler times! Yet just as the world is more complex, so are the opportunities more subtle. Web 2.0 offers hope for those who can grok the difference between publishing and syndication, between push and on-demand, between point-to-point and end-to-end, between comprehensive transmitability and asynchronous periodicity.

This issue of WebSphere Journal can hardly hope to addresss all these overriding issues (or are they meta-issues), but can take peeks at some of the facets of application development among IBM customers today.

Next month will see the completion of some of the thoughts started in this issue, as well as the commencement of new thoughts. The complexity seems almost Mandelbrotian, but the good news is that there appears to be infinite ways to solve the infinite challenges posed by enterprise IT problems (and opportunities) today.