Big vendors like Oracle, IBM and Microsoft are all over the show floor at the
Web 2.0 Expo this week, testimony that new Web-based technologies are making
their way into the enterprise. But some attendees are still wondering, what
is an enterprise mashup, and what will it do for me?

Enterprise mashups are lightweight applications that combine data from two
or more sources to create something more valuable than the sum of their parts.
They are often developed to solve a particular problem, implemented in days
rather than months, and use standards like POX (plain old XML), Atom and RSS
to make sharing and subscribing to them easy. They often combine internal and
external sources of data.

That's according to John Musser of ProgrammableWeb, which maintains a catalog
of public Web APIs (application programming interfaces) available to programmers
for building mashups. It added 120 new APIs to its directory in the first three
months of the year, up 150 percent from a year ago, and now has about 700 in
total. "The slope is increasing fast," Musser said in a talk at the
Web 2.0 Expo on Wednesday.

The mashup world is still immature, and there are hurdles for businesses that
need to be addressed. Service-level agreements aren't always available, data
quality is hard to assure and there are a host of security and regulatory issues
to grapple with. But still some companies are taking the plunge.

Great Lakes Educational Loan Services used an external e-signature service
from DocuSign to help it deal with the flood of loan requests it gets around
this time each year. It combined the service with its loan application system
on its Web site. In the first two months, 80 percent of its 72,000 applicants
used e-signatures, which cut its costs in this area by 75 percent, Musser said.

Car maker Audi used to collect data manually from 20 sources, including its
inventory system and competitors' Web sites, to do competitive analyses. Developers
at the company used a data mashup tool from Kapow
Technologies that now automates the process, and it took only four days
to build.

Mashups began in the consumer world and are often traced back to HousingMaps.com,
which combines property listings from the Craigslist
bulletin board with Google
Maps to make apartment hunting easier. The enterprise world lags behind
the consumer world by 18 to 24 months, according to Musser, but mashup tools
from vendors like IBM, Serena
Software, Tibco Software,
JackBe, Nexaweb
and others are closing the gap.

Service-level agreements are becoming more common too. Last week Amazon
rolled out two levels of paid support for its hosted storage and developer
services, and Google offers paid support options for its Maps API. A service
ecosystem is also emerging around mashups, including data feeds from companies
like Xignite and StrikeIron,
and services for monitoring a Web API's performance, like one offered by WebMetrics.
And big companies like BT Group,
Orange and FedEx increasingly offer Web APIs.

Mashups can address the "long tail" of demand for internal IT projects,
or the small projects that can be done quickly on an ad hoc basis, according
to Musser. Just as business users have learned to customize Excel to meet their
productivity needs, easy-to-use composer tools could make mashups "the
Excel of the future," he said.

Duane Nason, lead Web engineer with Gap, came to the Web 2.0 conference to
learn what role mashups might play at the clothing retailer. He said he can
imagine a useful tool that plots Gap stores or distribution centers on Google
Maps, although he also wondered whether third parties usually charge to use
their APIs. (Some do, some don't.)

Mashups are closely related to the SOA (service oriented architecture) model,
which promotes building loosely coupled applications that can be combined and
reused. Some see mashups as a way for companies to get more return on the big
investments they made in SOA.

The iPhone, with its full Web browser, is driving mashups to the mobile world,
said Rod Smith, an IBM vice president for emerging Internet technologies. He
showed a mashup on an iPhone here that displays property foreclosures in the
U.S. by zip code, along with their for-sale prices. It uses APIs from StrikeIron,
Trulia and Google Maps,
he said, and took three weeks to create.

But he also noted a problem for enterprises that may require a cultural change
to embrace mashups: IT departments that for years have been asked to protect
corporate data may be unwilling to suddenly offer it as a service that can be
consumed by anyone.

IDG News Service

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