Bungee Labs mashing up old-school CRM with new-school Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is all about data, according to Tim O'Reilly, but a company's most important data often goes missing from these data-driven applications. It has simply been too hard to mix old-school application data with new-school presentation layers.

Aberdeen Group notes that 51 percent of enterprises it recently surveyed "plan to integrate a CRM system with a Web 2.0 application," while only 20 percent currently do. Bungee Labs has just released a solution to that quandary. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak....

Enter Bungee Labs. It just announced integration between Netsuite, Oracle CRM On Demand and Saleforce.com (with Microsoft Dynamics and open-source SugarCRM shortly to come) with Web 2.0 applications, easily connected through its platform.

I've been watching Bungee Labs develop its technology for five years, initially as a fan and now as an advisor. It's very cool to see what it has created:

Companies use Bungee Connect to build desktop-like web applications that leverage multiple web services and databases, and then instantly deploy them on Bungee's high-performance multi-tenant grid infrastructure. By providing development, testing, deployment and hosting on a unified on-demand platform, Bungee Connect enables a new class of interactive rich web applications while eliminating significant complexity, time and cost across the entire application lifecycle....

User interaction with Bungee-powered applications can be delivered inside the CRM solution (e.g. tabs within Salesforce.com) or as stand-alone web applications.

Very cool. And very useful. This has got to be one of the biggest inhibitors to widespread adoption of next-generation applications: The data is still in yesterday's data repositories. By seamlessly connecting the two, Bungee may well open the door to greater adoption of Web 2.0.