Web 2.0 is growing up fast. What started as a collection of tools for savy net users to upgrade their personal lives is quickly becoming a part of the enterprise system. Blogs, social networking (via sites like LinkedIn), and wikis have all found their place in the working world. Now all the hype is focused on the latest Web 2.0 child to don a suit and tie: the mash-up.
In simple terms, a mashup is a program that takes data from disparate sources, manipulates that data, and then displays it in a form that makes it easy for people to read and process. This might mean a program that scrapes client street addresses from a database and then displays their location on google maps, or a piece of software that pulls information about order history from inventory records and open sales opportunities from the sales system to help generate predictions about product demand.
Ever since Forrester released its report entitled The Mashup Opportunity this past Spring, the tech world has been abuzz with chatter about enterprise mashups. And for a good reason too. Forrestor predicts that the enterprise mashup market could be a 700 million dollar golden egg by 2013. And they aren’t the only ones who see the potential. Even before the report Computerworld ran an article looking at how some small businesses had started exploring the benefits of mashups and finding as Jason Bloomberg, an analyst at ZapThink LLC told CW “mashups are becoming killer use cases for SOA.”
But while mashups are being hyped as the brand new thing in the enterpirse IT world, I think this may be a case of an old idea getting a new name. I’d even say Engage has been involved in the business of mashups since at least 2002, though we haven’t ever called them that. We just called it business integration.
Now granted there are some differences between traditional integration strategies and this new Web 2.0 concept. An article in SOA magazine outlines many of these distinctions, pointing out that mashups generally have a much smaller footprint than other integration tools and that mashups are usually developed for users by users. But these differences seem more like minor details instead of qualities of a separate category.
And ultimately, when coupled with the explosion that Software as a Service(Saas) is experiencing in recent years, some of the major distinctions between integration and the enterprise mashup may become less pronounced. The “for users by users” part especially could fade away as companies develop strong, long-term relationships with vendors who have just as much knowledge about their business as any employee or user. With that knowledge, these vendors can step in and take on the role of developing mashups, even though they may technically be company outsiders.
Of course, the tech world has already settled on seperating out the mashup as its own thing, so quibbling over language and categorizatoin is fairly pointless. And ultimately we at Engage are happy that the mashup is gaining all this attention, because it means companies are recognizing the importance of integrating all the disparate sources of information that they deal with. It’s the new challenge of the modern world, where information is abundant, but the time to process it isn’t. We need weapons to make absorbing all that information easier, and mashups are a great additional to the arsenal.
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