Enterprise Mashups

A Mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool. That is the Wikipedia definition anyway. For those who have been around the industry long enough, this may sound like a Portal. It is. Except, it uses a bunch of newer web 2.0 technologies like Ajax, and can aggregate content both on the client and on the server, versus Portals’ ability to only work with server-side aggregation.

On the consumer side, the Mashup revolution started with Google Earth and its open API luring hundreds and thousands of developers to munge applications to include geospatial content.

The question is, what is happening inside the Enterprise?

Recently, several enterprise software companies have announced Enterprise Mashup efforts: BEA’s Aqualogic Suite, IBM’s QEDWiki, Serena’s Mashup Composer, to name a few. It seems to me, the main benefit in using mashups inside the enterprise is in easily integrating various applications that are needed to address specific business issues. Example: A CFO needs an understanding of the sales pipeline, to be able to accurately predict quarterly revenues. To make this possible, a Mashup of a Financial forecasting system is needed with a CRM / Sales forecasting system. The value proposition of Enterprise Mashups, thus, rests squarely in a realm that formerly used to be called Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). It is therefore not at all surprising that Middleware and integration vendors like BEA and IBM are jumping into the fray.

Some say, Enterprise Mashups would make it easy for business people to quickly pull together applications. Well, I don’t buy that.
I do buy, however, that it would make it a lot easier for IT to achieve more rapid integration cycles.

Finally, one of the key issues that gets exposed once applications from all over the place get pulled in is tackling the operational challenge of such endeavors. Policies tend to be different across various applications. Security, Fault Tolerance, Transparency,
Load Balancing – all sorts of policies need to be enforced in the newly concocted composite application. This requires a whole new
set of infrastructure solutions, and companies like IBM, in their QEDWiki product, are experimenting with new technologies that are still very much in stealth mode. A notable startup in the field is Kapow Technologies, a vendor of Mashup Servers.

At any rate, I thought this would be a good time to invite reader comments about things you are doing in this area, and how Enterprise Mashups are changing the face of EAI and its close cousin, Business Process Management (BPM). My personal opinion is that like everything else, Enterprise Mashups also require some killer ‘composite apps’ to help it establish foothold inside the enterprise, and startups would do well to look into the fates of companies like Composite Software.