What Google Chrome Can Teach Us About Enterprise Mashups

A few weeks ago Google announced Chrome, a next-generation virtual machine posing as a browser. While it looks and feels like a very minimalistic browser, the innovation isn’t the look and feel but rather it’s underlying architecture. In layman’s terms, each tab is its own mini browser running in its own environment. So, if one tab hangs or crashes, it doesn’t bring down your whole browser. The other architectural innovation is a JavaScript engine that significantly outperforms it’s peers. If you’re an Ajax developer, you’ve been waiting for this for a long time.

Equally interesting, Google added a nice marketing twist by introducing the world to Chrome through a cartoon. It turns out to be a great non-technical way to educate people as to what we’re missing by using IE/Safari/Firefox and why they created Chrome. I like this approach and it made me think about my own little techie world of enterprise mashups. How I could use this approach with my customers and prospects? Simple. I created my own comic strip with ‘Enterprise Mashup Dude’ in the starring role.

Enterprise mashups is a new, emerging category. Enterprise Mashup Dude’s first task is to help organizations understand exactly where mashups fits in their architecture. We’ve found that it’s quite common for IT folk to try to contrast and compare new technologies like enterprise mashup with existing technologies. This is both good and bad. It’s good because it’s IT’s job to identify new technology that can augment their existing technology. It’s bad when IT is threatened by such new technologies (they may view it as a disruptor to their incumbent technologies).

We also frequently encounter IT folks who understandably try to address enterprise mashup capabilities through their existing technology. In the case of enterprise mashups, the common comparison points include such as Data Warehouses, Business Intelligence (BI), Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs), and SaaS platforms like Salesforce.com. But there are many others as well and it would be an endless conversation if we had to compare and contrast to all existing enterprise technologies. So we came up with a clear and succinct phrase to cover 80% of the comparisons. The phrase is: “mashups don’t move data from system to system, they ‘mash’ data from systems to the user”.

But we can do better. We can illustrate this with a few “Chrome-toons” conversations between Enterprise Mashup Dude and a couple of friends:

(click to see the life-size Enterprise Mashup Dude)
I hope the point is obvious: mashups are different from ESBs, BI tools, data warehouses and even SaaS solution like Salesforce.com. They don’t integrate by moving data from one system to another. They mash data from multiple systems in real-time. It’s so simple a cartoon can explain it.