Enterprise Mashups and Total Cost of Ownership

What is all the Web 2.0, Ajax, Enterprise 2.0, SOA buzz in the driving towards? What does it mean for the line-of-business manager or the enterprise itself? I thought I’d take a moment at breaking down how the approaches/ideas and supporting technologies could positively impact the underlying business books. As to not make this to vague, I’ll take the latest hallmark of Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Mashups, and a classic financial benchmark Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), and we’ll deconstruct how this latest set of technologies and techniques stands up against an old benchmark.

The TCO of a solution must take into account the initial and ongoing costs of the solution, relative to the solution it replaces. Enterprise Mashups (which are closely related to composite applications if not the same depending on one’s definition) are based upon a SOA and have the potential to lower TCO in several ways, including:

• Managing the Services in an SOA is less expensive and complex than managing the interfaces in a traditional integration solution.

• By leveraging the Web Services standards, mashups can lower the cost of proprietary technologies. Standards level the competitive playing field for vendors by lowering prices generally, and also simplify the task of integration, lowering costs directly.

• Business analysts and technical business users are able to compose applications without the involvement of more expensive IT personnel.

• The more complex a business change is, the more effective SOA-based mashups can be at reducing the TCO of the solution because of their inherently flexible nature.

Fundamentally, a SOA provides business an “agility quotient” – the more complex the underlying infrastructure and the more dynamic the business environment, the greater the benefit of an agile architecture to the business. SOAs provide the ability for business users to create enterprise mashups, thus creating and managing business processes.

Where am I going with all of this and how does it fit into the world of Ajax, RIA, or JackBe for that matter? There is one important piece yet missing – the user interface itself. If the tools that users interact with aren’t agile themselves, the benefits of these enterprise mashups to the organization risk being lost. The services that contribute to a mashup can now be consumed by light-weight client models thanks to Ajax. This is why the integration layer will be driven by those who are experienced with client side models. The back-end can do their part, expose the services, which they have or are doing so, but they aren’t going to be able to create what is truly needed for the consumption because this is not there expertise. The services are moving out farther-the power of the apps as well-to the client so it only makes sense that the driver of this integration will be through the client tier experts and more specifically, those skilled in Ajax.

Later, I’ll attempt to address the benefits of incorporating SOA, Ajax, and Mashups into the enterprise to more strategic business benefits. Please feel free to leave your comments and opinions.