Welcome to the Party IBM!

Wow, two big weeks in a row for enterprise software. Last week was all about the now-passe Oracle/BEA/Sun/MySQL acquisitions. This week is another big week for enterprise software: IBM announced ‘Lotus Mashups’ at LotusSphere this week.

This is a major milestone for ‘Web 2.0 for the Enterprise’. Sure upstarts like JackBe talk about this stuff. But when leading-edge technologies like enterprise mashups are productized by a tried-and-true software provider like IBM, you know that your conservative, non-early-adopter type of CIO has gotta ask ‘what’s that and do I need it?’. I think Ian White at ComputerWeekly summed it up best: “Using browser based technology Mashup will enable internal and external business objects to be deployed and connected by end users. This will create a new generation of self service applications defined by end users and connecting processes and data at the glass in a way that suit the business not just IT. Potentially this is a very exciting announcement.”

And this should also be a wakeup call for the rest of the big enterprise software providers who don’t have a concise enterprise mashup offering (I’m talking about companies like SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, CA and HP). Soon these guys will realize what IBM already knows: enterprise mashups are the face of a SOA platform for the business user. How can you not have that as part of your enterprise software portfolio?

IBM’s Rod Smith and David Boloker have been spearheading mashups at IBM for well over a year and we grudgingly admit they’ve done justice to the concept (we like their alphaWorks QEDWiki site). And we think JackBe and IBM are not just aligned in its marketing-speak, but also aligned in our overall architectural view of the enterprise mashup space. Check out the architectural similarities between Lotus Mashups and JackBe’s Presto. It's qualities like this that [we think] make mashups enterprise-ready and enterprise-grade:

• Lightweight and server-based;
• Built around security and governance;
• Dynamically driven;
• Consumes multiple data sources;
• Gets data to the user quickly;
• Let’s the user tag, search and share mashups.

You probably know that IBM has five major software brands: DB2, Lotus, Tivoli, Rational, WebSphere. If you know what these brands encompass then you’d probably agree it makes sense they’re putting mashups under the Lotus brand. Lotus is the most ‘user-centric’ of the 5. And I think it is also a testament to the fact that enterprise mashups can actually be about the user, not the developer or some back-office middleware software. This is, of course, exactly what we mean with our now semi-infamous tagline, ‘The User is the Killer App’.

And we hope that continued focus on the business user can remove some of the FUD (that ‘fear, uncertainty, and doubt’ for you non-warrior types out there) concerning user-facing/user-driven Web 2.0 technologies like enterprise mashups, wikis, and blogs. I think Ross Mayfield expressed these concerns best: “The new [Lotus Mashups] tool gives users an easy way to build composite applications that they can share with others and publish to their own or a shared workspace. One analyst said he wondered if IT administrators would be concerned by the possible security and management implications that may arise.”

While we at JackBe agree there are issues like security and governance to consider (and we’d like to think we have a pretty good handle on them), the real impediment to ‘user-driven’ enterprise solutions seems to simply be our 25+ years of inwardly-focused IT efforts. This makes it easy to forget that the average business user is more-and-more technically-inclined and self-sufficient every day. You can thank the constant flow of consumer-type sites like FaceBook, Digg, and NetVibes for that. ‘Born Digital’ has an entirely new meaning now.

So, if you are a Lotus customer, congratulations! You have something to look forward to. But, if you’re like many companies who don’t have Lotus, come give JackBe’s Presto a look.

I can't wait to see what next week brings...