enterprise mashups

Mashups mainstream by 2013 according to Forrester

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According to a new report from Forrester Research Enterprise Mashups will reach their tipping point during 2009-2010 and then become part of the general IT landscape by 2013. This means that the old IT gigants like IBM, Oracle and Microsoft will dominate the mashup market and mashup platforms will be part of their offerings. I guess this means that Microsoft Popfly will merge into Sharepoint and IBM Mashup Hub will merge with WebSphere.

Forrester divides mashups into three types:

  • Presentation layer mashups – merge content from seperate sources into one view, the simplest type of mashups.
  • Data mashups – more complex data driven mashups that get data from several sources and present them in one view
  • Process mashups – mixes business processes and users with data from several data sources.

Presentation mashups and data mashups sound very much similar to me, but then again I dont get payed by Forrester… But Forrester has a lot of influence over this so unless Gartner comes up with another definition this is the ones we have to live with.

I am glad to see that Forrester also realized that enterprise mashups will be huge. It is kind of a self realizing profecy – there will be a lot of men in ties reading this report so it is going to help Enterprise Mashups grow. It is really the next wave in enterprise software. And if you are reading my humble blog you are already years ahead of the mashup wave 🙂

For more info about this report see Forrester: Enterprise Mashups to Hit $700 Million by 2013 on ReadWriteWeb.

Enterprise Mashup Infrastructure – my Web 2.0 Expo presentation

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Right now I am in Berlin at the Web 2.0 Expo. The sessions here are brilliant but the general organisation and the exposition hall are not impressive (but I promise not to rant more about that). More about the sessions in later posts.

Yesterday I had a presentation about Enterprise Mashup Infrastructure that you might find interesting. It deals with Mashups in general, mostly from a perspective of improving the productivity of knowledge workers. I also list the 4 types of mashup projects as well as some real-life customers that use Mashups in these ways:

  • Opportunistic Applications (Audi)
  • Repurposing (Deusche Post)
  • Web Automation (GMX)
  • Data Collection (SimplyHired)

Explaining Enterprise Mashups

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The last few days I have been doing a lot of thinking around Enterprise Mashups, what they are and what they are good for. A problem that I have keept running into is to explain mashups to business users and system architects stuck in a SOA and integration world. It is not easy making mashups sound like anything else than a Google Map hype, but now I have come up with some methaphores that might do the trick

Excel is today arguably one of the most popular programs inside Enterprises, and the question is why this is. I think it is because:

  • It allows business users to look at data they way they want to
  • It gives business users the powerful ability to build mini-applications as needed without support from a central IT-department. What I mean by mini-apps here are everything from a set of advanced formulas to Visual Basic code.

At the same time integration and SOA is extremely important for Enterprises because:

  • It allows sharing data between systems which increases the overall value of that data
  • Together several systems can solve more problems than the systems can individually (the sum is bigger than the parts)

The great thing with Mashups is that it combines all these advantages. It allows users build their mini-applications (“opportunistic applications” or “situational applications”) to automate manual procedures in order to look and work with data in the way they want. Mashups and the light-weight technology it is bsed on (REST, AJAX, RSS, Atom etc) also makes it easy to make systems integrate with each other.

Mashups are not a silver bullet that solves all problems, but it has huge potential to put more power into the hands of business user which in turn makes them more productive.