When it comes to corporate applications, it's been pretty well established that the number one problem in terms of deriving a major return on the investment made in these applications is their general lack of usability.

There's nothing necessarily new about that with possibly the exception that vendors are finally acknowledging the fact that the problem basically starts with them. After all, the user interface basically reflects the data model underneath the application. The problem is that most applications are really modular sets of loosely-coupled components organized in a hierarchical structure. As a result, they are not particularly well integrated, which means that most users never really discover the value of a lot of features that lie buried in the application.

On the positive side, the success of Web 2.0 style applications in the consumer space is being noted by vendors that develop enterprise applications, Case in point is a company called IFS that is rolling out a new Aurora user interface that is not only more visually appealing, it includes support for built-in search, mashup tools and a reasonably robust application programming interface.

From the average user's perspective, the most significant advance being made here is the built-in search. Most people have a difficult time finding what they are looking for inside any suite of ERP applications. Enterprise search tools in general have been a disappointment because they are difficult to implement and manage. But enterprise search within an existing application construct is a good idea because the vendor takes care of all the indexing requirements. So rather than trying to wrestle with massive enterprise search effort, the better part of valor for most IT organizations is going to be to wait for software vendors to get around to embedding that functionality directly in their applications.

Of course, search is only one piece of the Web 2.0 puzzle. IT organizations should expect the software vendor community to generally follow IFS's lead in terms of adding support for richer mashup tools and APIs. The only real question is given the massive amount of code these vendors are trying to support, how long will it take for them to rework the underlying data models of their applications to provide a more compelling Web 2.0 experience. Unfortunately, the truth is that it's going to take most of them a very long time, which in turn may create opportunities for software vendors that are carrying less weight into the future.

Whatever happens, it's pretty clear that end users have developed new expectations about the way software should run and behave. That presents a major challenge to developers of enterprise software applications that could easily wind up reallocating market share across the whole category.