A Storm is Coming: Mashups as a User-Enabling Enterprise Catalyst

We're a bit behind on our blogs. But let me tell you what I told my boss earlier this week: we have a huge list of excuses. Most importantly, we've been busy launching Presto 2.0, the next generation of our award-winning enterprise mashup platform. It includes a huge set of new capabilities but a few are notable innovations: Mashlets, user-created badge-like interfaces to mashups, and our Excel Connector, a lightweight Excel plug-in to publish/consume mashups to/from spreadsheets. Both are very user-centric solutions that bring mashups right into the spreadsheets, portals and blogs that business folk use daily.

And to compliment our Presto 2.0 announcement we rolled out our new Mashup Readiness Test, announced our Spring Mashup Webcast Series, published a column and a chalk-talk video, exhibited at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo, and launched a brand new edition of our website to wrap it all up in a nice package. (Whew!) But JackBe's activity last week was only part of a much larger movement. What's most interesting was the hyper focus Web 2.0 technologies, particularly mashups, received from the analysts, press and conference-goers last week. I think what we're seeing is the beginning of a perfect storm, one with enterprise mashups at the center.

I have always been intrigued by trends and patterns. Here's a few I see, some obvious, some perhaps not. On the technology side, we [finally] have acceptance of RIA technologies such as Ajax, Flash/Flex and Silverlight as a browser-based presentation technology. SOA, and services in general, are gaining momentum as outside-the-firewall business data providers. And perhaps in part to JackBe and our peers, mashups and widgets have become very popular topics in enterprise circles. (Just take a peek at these to see what I mean: InfoWorld, eWeek, ComputerWorld, PC World, Forrester, VentureBeat, and even more from InfoWorld.)

On the business side, we're beginning to see acceptance of 'iSaaS' solutions (my term), that look and feel like SaaS offerings but are provisioned by the IT department but run by the business folks. Equally important, executive teams are beginning to see the Web 2.0 light, in some cases by choice and in some by force. (I have a great story about the head-fake Web 2.0 technologies can give an executive team but I'll save it for another post.) And these are business trends supported by my time on the floor at the Web 2.0 Expo. The 10,000 attendees at the Web 2.0 Expo weren't all Facebook developers, I assure you. The event was packed with architects wanting to learn how Web 2.0 technologies can solve their business problems.

And that's the storm I see brewing: technology and business beginning to align for some true synergy. As I see it, the three trends that are driving this perfect storm are:

1. Enterprise data is becoming more and more accessible via services.
2. More and more decisions are made based on internal and external data.
3. Users are getting technology savvy to solve problems themselves.

Now take these three enterprise trends and trow in mashup technology as a catalyst. Here's the explosive results:

1. Enterprise Mashups combine data from internal and external web services,
2. Enterprise Mashups let end-users do the creating and sharing,
3. Enterprise Mashups expose data into the common user tools like portals and spreadsheets.

The real message here is the user-facing nature of this trend. This is a swing away from our 20-year love affair with monolithic systems. Don't get me wrong, IT has done a great job of automation of many automatable tasks but monoliths do nothing for users trying to address their Long Tail information needs. The coming storm will fix that. It is a storm of RIA, SOA, widgets, iSaaS, and self-service, one that will include the business folks and the IT folks, and one with a healthy dose of enterprise mashups. It is a storm every enterprise should be eagerly anticipating.