What is an Enterprise Mashup?:
- Lightweight application
- Developed inside the enterprise
- Created by IT or business staff
- Created in days not months
- Uses a web oriented architecture
- Often uses internal and external web services
- Done at the data, logic and/or presentation layer.
Why Mashup?
- Save money - Workflow mashup. Great lakes loan services. Integrating docusign web services achieved a 75% cost decrease
- Save time - Deal tracking and collaboration by Societe Generale. An upgrade took 3 days instead of 3 months
- Save Effort - CRM mashup - PGP and Dunn and Bradstreet
- Reduce the IT Backlog
Mashups are familiar
- Lightweight composite applications
- Portals and dashboards
- Enterprise Application Integration
- Extract, Transform and Load
Mashups are like these - just simpler and faster. Smaller scope means we can implement disposable applications because the time to value is orders of magnitude faster.
External Drivers for Enterprise Mashups
Web 2.0 is coming to the Enterprise with OpenAPIs. Web sites are becoming programmable services. APIs at programmable web are adding 120 APIs in Q1 2008. This is a 150% increase over the previous year.
Mapping is one of the most popular API sets. Enterprise API sector is now in the top 15 categories. Finance segment doubled in 6 months. Telephony, mobile and messaging now have over 50 APIs.
Internal Driver for Enterprise Mashups
- Getting the ROI from SOA.
- Enterprise Mashups already exist. Enterprises call this the Excel spreadsheet with cut and paste.
Mashups depend on a Web Oriented Architecture
- REST - The way the web works
- URIs and URLs - How everything is addressed
- Open Data Formats - lain old XML, RSS, JSON and ATOM
- SOA comes from the middleware legacy and is more structured, static and top-down.
- WOA is more dynamic and simpler and is more application centric.
- Programmable Web maps APIs by type. 68% support REST. 29% support SOAP. REST is also growing much faster.
Data as a Service: Xignite and StrikeIron
Infrastructure Services: Webmetrics and Mashery
Professional Services: IBM and CapGemini
App Marketplaces: The AppExchange (Salesforce.com), Serena and Google Solutions Marketplace.
Where will you run your enterprise mashups?
There are a growing array of choices:
- Do it yourself
- Managed Hosting - Opsource
- Cloud Computing - Joyent, Amazon Web Services, Mosso
- Cloud Interactive Development Environments - Force.com, Bungee Connect
- Cloud Application Builders - Coghead
Top 4 Enterprise Mashup Challenges:
Taken from Dion Hinchcliffe's Top Ten challenges:
- Immature Marketplace - We are in the early adopter phase
- SLA for APIs - Lack of SLAs is a barrier
- Security - Access Rights, Identity, compliance and regulations
- Data Quality and Trust - trust applies to internal and external data
Mashup advice for IT
- Beware the hype
- Make SOA a mashup platform - use open standards an expose services
- Start simply
- Think tools - to enable adoption and speed of creation
- Add governance as needed
Addressing the challenges:
- Amazon and Google are addressing the SLA issue. Premium service offerings provide paid support.
- Vendor software will increasingly offer mashup capabilities in their tools. For example IBM Websphere can incorporate Google Gadgets in to the portal server. Salesforce.com has integrated with Facebook to bring social context to enterprise applications.
There is a lot of activity around scraping tools. This is seen as a stepping stone to allow the API enablement of existing applications. The other strategy is to use database extract tools.
