"The information workers in your company have all this knowledge," Carges said. "What if you could search for it and use it to drive applications and behavior and performance out to the users or to your customer base?"

BEA's answer comes in the form of three new internal projects that will marry Web 2.0 features and development tools to BEA's portals so that ordinary users can create and manage what Carges calls "situational applications" without the help of IT staff.

Graffiti will add social-bookmarking and tagging features to the AquaLogic and WebLogic portals so that users can place and search on tagged content, as with sites such as del.icio.us.

"It will do wonders for the enterprise and benefit corporations in ways we can't imagine," Carges said. "Suddenly you're taking traditional applications and situational applications and bridging them."

The two other projects, Runner and Builder, will help workers create those situational applications.