Mashups Matter to the Enterprise

Mashups may have blossomed in the consumer space, but they were born in the enterprise arena—and they have a significant role to play there.

By Eric J. Bruno

Everyone likes to talk about software re-use, but not everyone grasps its transformative value, which lies in reusing data rather than lines of code. That value is becoming more apparent in the consumer space, where Web 2.0 mashups—Web applications that combine data from two or more sources—have become popular. For example, consumers today can combine Google Maps data with their own vacation data and photos on Flickr to create mashups displaying on a map the photos they took in the cities they visited. Of course, to do this, they don't need to touch a line of Google's code. All they need is access to its data, which is exposed via APIs.

Given their popularity in the consumer space, some say it was only a matter of time before mashups entered the enterprise arena. But actually, mashups were conceived in the enterprise. After all, Web services or Web-based enterprise applications that drive key business processes or service customers came into vogue back in 2000, well before a single consumer mashup site hit the Web. In fact, any application based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) is, technically, a mashup. RSS feeds and the broadcasting of data via publish/subscribe protocols have been used in the enterprise even longer.

If consumer interest in mashups stirs up more enterprise interest in leveraging the technology to business advantage, great. But enterprises have more stringent requirements for pursuing mashup development. For instance, they demand a framework that combines corporate data from SOA components, Ajax-enabled Web interfaces and built-in features that satisfy security, reliability and corporate compliance mandates. The framework also needs to be based on standards.

Reuters Knowledge mashes up multiple data sources to help investment bankers perform research.

Dynamic Business Applications

Perhaps the most important difference, however, is that enterprise mashups need to be bidirectional—they need to provide full-cycle access to data. Users should be able to add, modify, move, contribute to, or somehow transform and aggregate the data the application uses. This two-way data cycle, combined with the conventional Internet protocols and Ajax capabilities of Web 2.0 applications, leads to what some call dynamic business applications.