One of the ‘special pleasures’ of CEOs everywhere is money. How to make sure your company makes enough of it, how to make sure you company doesn't spend too much of it, and so on. So it is with a very deep personal satisfaction that I can report that JackBe has received $9.5 million in funding for sales, marketing and, most important for all of you, continued development of our enterprise mashup software platform, Presto. It is this kind of milestone event that can make even the most grizzled software veteran reflect on the changes that a rapidly-growing industry like ours has already undergone and where it is heading.
It’s easy to forget that less than 2 years ago you couldn’t find a reference to ‘mashups’ unless you listened to late night radio. But enterprise mashups today get coverage in the general business press, make the to-do list of CIOs and enterprise architects, and even rank high on analysts lists of technologies to watch and embrace. Notable mashup software/service providers include a literal Who’s Who of heavy-weight companies like IBM, Yahoo, and Microsoft. And we’ve already seen some frighteningly-quick exits from the mashup space, a few notable sudden entries, and the obligatory wannabes who want to ride the mashup coattails while hoping you can’t tell the difference. All this in 2 short years.
Most importantly, the vernacular and the technology of mashups has grown by leaps and bounds. For example, here at JackBe we’ve introduced the first Mashup Markup Language, an XML/XQuery/XPath answer to creating complex mashups, and Mashlets, a mashup visualization that can be published and consumed in a variety of platforms including portals, RIAs, Wikis, blogs and just any old web site. We also introduced the first set of guidelines for mashup buyers and implementors in our 5 Cs of Enterprise Mashups. And like JackBe, we’re seeing other mashup vendors relating their products to broader enterprise IT efforts like ERP/SFA, portals, RIAs, and perhaps most notably, SOAs.
So, here we are. Smarter than we were 2 years ago. More relevant. More motivated. And I genuinely believe that the opportunity ahead of us is huge. We have a great chance of being a technology that forever leaves an enduring mark in the enterprise software ecosystem. But it’s not a done deal. The experts tell us we still face some hurdles. If the last 2 years are any indication of our future trajectory, you’ll need to hold on tight. It should be one heck of a ride.
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'If you torture numbers long enough, you can get them to say just about anything...'
-- Original Author Unknown
I am a Mathematics geek by training (
Carnegie-Mellon University, class of 1990) and still have a big fixation with numbers today. And I am proud to say that I've used my skills to turn a mathematical equation into a memory trick, one I've been befuddling my coworkers with for days:
600,000,000 + 8.4 + 5 + 10 = ?
The answer is 'Enterprise Mashups', of course. More accurately, it's a Reader's Digest list of a number of notable events you might want to take note of. In the immortal words of
Inigo Montoya, 'Lemme esplain':
- 600,000,000 is the number of service calls our partner, Xignite, gets every month for financial information. I heard this number for the first time in our joint webcast with Xignite yesterday, 'Enterprise Mashup Boot Camp: What, Why and How?', and it's a number I will not soon forget. If you didn't think hosted business information services were coming of age, this should put that idea to rest. (And if you missed the webcast, we've got a whole slew of them in the next few months!)
- 8.4 is the rating JackBe received in a recent InfoWorld review, 'Refining the art of enterprise Web apps'. JackBe has worked very hard for the last 2 years to evolve from a simple Ajax provider to an enterprise-class mashup vendor. This kind of review makes us very proud and, we think, validates the results of our efforts. And we're already hard at work on the next generation of enterprise mashup features (some of which you may have seen us preview at AjaxWorld last month), which we're confident will put us even further ahead of our competition.
- 5 is the number of 'must haves' for enterprise mashups that we outlined in an ECommerce Times article, 'Making Mashups Work in the Enterprise'. We 've talked a bit about the 5C Framework in the past and this article gives it even more depth.
- 10 is the number of Gartner’s top technologies for 2008 and, no surprise, mashups make the list. To steal straight from the column, 'Gartner outlined its top 10 strategic technology areas for 2008 and many roads lead to service oriented architecture'. Definitely worth a read.
I think I've tortured the numbers enough for one day. I hope my mother reads this and finally sees that my math degree wasn't wasted.
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Whew! What a week we just had! JackBe got a mention in a major newspaper, was at 2 conferences, participated in an industry association, and unveiled 3 major new product innovations.
In case you missed the mention in our previous post, JackBe got a small nod in The Wall Street Journal in an article titled Do-It-Yourself Software. At the very same time, we were a big sponsor of AjaxWorld. And that’s where the real interested stuff really began (particularly for you).
JackBe CTO John Crupi and Lead Architect Kishore Subramanian presented the opening session titled "Let My People Mash". John talked about the architectural aspects of enterprise mashups and discussed the C5 Framework for Enterprise Mashups. Kishore went on to do a live demonstration of one of our newest innovations, Presto Wires, browser-based visual mashup designer and composer. Wires is a bit akin to Yahoo Pipes except that it has an enterprise focus and is built on our Presto Edge mashup server.
In the Wires demo, Kishore showed how easy it was to create a mashup that invoked several third-party services, merged and filtered the results, and published the mashup as another service that can be consumed by the users. He then showed how to mashup SalesForce WSDL web services to create a mashup that encapsulates some complex micro-orchestration of multiple SalesForce services (login, query for Sales Leads) and Yahoo Geocode REST service (to obtain geocodes for each Sales lead obtained from SalesForce query). And there wasn’t a single line of code involved.
For both these scenarios, Kishore also demonstrated how easy it is to create a mini-application (we call them Mashlets) that encapsulates the mashup functionality and becomes a entity that can be published and consumed in a variety of platforms like portals, websites, wikis and RIAs. All in all, we think it made for a powerful demonstration of enterprise mashups!
In a separate session, JackBe’s Chief Architect Raj Krishnamurthy and VP of Engineering Deepak Alur presented a talk entitled "The Language of Enterprise Mashups". In this session we revealed the details on yet another innovation from JackBe, our Enterprise Mashup Markup Language (EMML), a declarative XML-based user-oriented mashup language we use in our enterprise mashup server that is exposed via Wires. We think this is the first enterprise mashup language in the industry and it is very focused towards the users needs rather than the IT developers needs.
Wires, Mashlets and the EMML are great examples of the continuous innovation in Enterprise Mashup technology that everyday brings us closer to the goal of empowering the end-user. We will post the recordings of these sessions as soon as they are available. And the Trial Download of Presto will include Wires and Mashlet functionality very soon. (We'll make sure we call those out on this blog when they go live.) In the meantime, you can check out a few pics from the event on our Flickr page. And if you were at the show, saw our stage presentations, or had a chance to stop by our booth, we would love to hear your impressions.
Now most folks would consider this a full week. But we were just getting started! Deepak also participated in the Mashup Summit on the UCSF campus and an Open Ajax Alliance discussion. . But more about those events in our next post…we need a cup of coffee first.
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