Enterprise Mashups without Governance = 10 to Life

Darryl Taft at eWeek just published a good recap of the opening panel discussion from this week’s Webservices/SOA on Wallstreet Conference, ‘Enterprise Mashups For Wall Street – Leveraging SOA and Web 2.0’. I was also at the show and had a chance to listen to the panel discussion live. The best part of the discussion was when the conversation went down the path of Innovation versus Governance.

During this thread, an interesting statement was made by Rene Bonvanie, SVP of Marketing at Serena. Darryl wrote that Rene said; 'governance should take a back seat to innovation’. Boy, was this the wrong thing to say to a financial audience where governance is #1 on IT’s priority list! We all know if you don’t enforce governance in the financial services sector, you and your office mates may spend some some time in prison. Just ask the folks at Societe Generale about their US$7.14 billion fraud.

Of course innovation and governance are not mutually exclusive. Actually, when it comes to enterprise mashups, strong governance fosters innovation, not suppresses it. With strong governance in place, you can actually open up more data. And we’re very proud to say that we’ve been talking about governance from the day one, even making it the very centerpiece of our 5 rules to making mashups work in the enterprise.

JackBe’s enterprise mashup platform, Presto, is built on a deep security and governance foundation that ensures adherence to IT’s requirements while still empowering the business user with robust mashup capabilities. And coincidentally, we recently added even more governance functionality to Presto through our Presto Connector for HP SOA Systinet. We’re not talking about rhetoric here but a real, tangible governance solution for mashups.

Luckily, the other panel members didn’t have the same view as Bonvanie. They all believed governance was paramount and would actually accelerate innovation and SOA adoption. Cheers to them!