A number of us from ENKI went to the Web 2.0 Conference last week.  I wanted to share the single most important take-away that I got from the conference with you.

Last year's conference floor was almost a venture capitalist's fire sale.  There were numerous startup companies exhibiting their concepts and beta sites, vying for mindshare and potentially funding.  However, despite my careful attention to who was walking the aisles, I saw very few investors interested in the startups.  Instead, it seemed that most of the attendees were entrepreneurship fans looking to absorb some of the glory, knowledge, and experience that they would need to start their own companies.  In a many of the conference sessions, the Q&A was - rather irritatingly - taken up by newbs asking the most basic questions of the presenting entrepreneurs to their evident frustration.  It was at times almost like attending a Robert Kiyosaki real estate investment seminar, where the not-so-hidden question is always "how do I make my first 10 million?"

This year, the conference seemed to have learned from last year's experiences, and more of the booths and sessions were tailored to assist people in creating their own Web startup companies.  But the most impressive change is that the industry as a whole understands that creating your own Web startup is not only desirable to a large audience, but also possible with the technologies reaching maturity today. 

What I saw was a large number of products designed to reduce the barrier to going live with your own Web application.  The most obvious were companies such as Google or the many hosted application development systems that create a limited, simplified environment for you to create and deploy your application.  By constraining the environment, the vendor can support your development effort more easily with prewritten code for user interface creation and basic system functions, as well as simplifying deployment into their own application hosting framework.  For many with a simple Web application in mind, these new development and deployment frameworks make life easy.

But there's also help on the way for the more traditional Web applications, developed from scratch in one of the popular implementation systems such as Java, Ruby on Rails, PHP, etc.  I saw a number of standalone application development environments (often based on the versatile Eclipse IDE) that simplify the coding process (perhaps in some case over-simplifying it.)  The most impressive was Liquid Apps, which will generate code for multiple languages, and import specifications such as UML as well.

On the deployment side, I saw a number of new options for entrepreneurs to deploy to the Cloud, beyond the old standby of Amazon's AWS.    Even AWS was dressed up with third parties offering deployment and management solutions that take some of the edge off Amazon's much maligned peccadillos.  What was missing was easy one-touch deployment solutions for the application development environments that would eliminate entrepreneurs' having to become IT experts.

Development and deployment seem to be heavily on the minds of entrepreneurs. I spent much of my time representing ENKI and 3Tera in the 3Tera booth, and I must have fielded hundreds of questions about how to set up a Web application with little or no IT knowledge.   Fortunately, this is the need that ENKI was founded to address, so I had some answers!

However, the answers that I had usually involved ENKI's operations services.  And, I believe there's a good reason for this, which will take a long time for the industry to address.  If I look at what we do for our customers, it will take significant technology advances to automate these operations - if they can be automated at all:

• application-related virtual data center design
• middleware and operating system tuning 
• optimal software release processes
• application-level monitoring and response
• optimal database design
• low down-time management processes
• design-for-test

Granted, many smaller Web application deployments don't need this level of expertise - but how many of those smaller sites are owned by entrepreneurs who want to grow them to be The Next Big Thing?

So my take-away is that this year's Web 2.0 Conference was all about lowering the barriers to creating and deploying your own Web app - just what many entrepreneurs were looking for.  But what's still missing is a simple end-to-end answer for deployment and management. 

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