Mashing Oracle without Oracle

As an ex-Oracle guy of 5 years, I know that Oracle-bashing is an enticing pastime. As proof, consider how folks like Paul Greenberg and Dennis Howlett have recently taken Oracle to task for their general 'failure to innovate'. I am generally not one 'pile on' and I certainly do not wish Oracle any ill will (JackBe is a proud Oracle partner and, personally, some of my closest friends earn their livelihood there).

But I stumbled across Oracle's corporate blog site a few days ago and I must say that it truly surprised me when I couldn't find 'mashup' in their blog tag cloud. Sure, a few blogs mention the term, but there are precious few that give the topic any real attention.

Any dedicated Oracle-watcher knows that they have no product, or concise feature-set within an existing product, to enable the virtuous circle of mashups. Considering that Oracle is the leader in data-driven software and manufacturers much the data-creating, data-management and data-reporting products in the world, how can mashups NOT be on Oracle's radar?

Luckily, those who want to bring some mashup agility and efficiency into their organizations can get help from places other than Redwood Shores.  I recently put a camera in front of Danny Malks, JackBe's VP of Application Platform and got him to walk through the fundamental value of mashup for Oracle-driven enterprises. Here's his 3-minute walk-through of mashups for enterprises that use Oracle (a little or a lot):



And I can tell you that Danny's example is just the tip of the iceberg. JackBe's Chief Oracle Mechanic, Karthic Thope, recently showed off a killer 5-part mashup that included Oracle Siebel, Oracle Peoplesoft, and Oracle E-Business Suite, all secured through Oracle's LDAP and all of it delivered to Oracle WebCenter. You can check out the 15-minute demo at http://www.jackbe.com/videos/JackBe-MashupsForOracle.mov (be patient, it is a very big video).  This is, in my studied opinion, a true example of an enterprise mashup.

I know that some might say 'Oracle has that kind of stuff on its roadmap'. Perhaps. An organization of Oracle's size always has a lot of promise. But 'just wait' is no longer a workable reply and Oracle has a lot of things on its plate. I wrote about this simple quandry almost 18 months ago, asking 'how long do you wait while Oracle is executing on its massive product integration plans'?

And since that post, I think it is an understatement to say that our world has changed drastically. Now a 6- or 12-month delay can truly mean the difference between a company in the black and a company on the block. Organizations need to find a way to innovate in the fastest, most agile way today.

JackBe will be showing Oracle Mashups at Collaborate 09 in Orlando in May.  Stop by our booth.  We'd love to mash with you there. No waiting.

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The Sharepoint Dilemma

A recent ZDNet blog post from Dion Hinchcliffe entitled "Sharepoint and Enterprise 2.0: The good, the bad, and the ugly" discusses Microsoft SharePoint within the context of Web and Enterprise 2.0.

Frankly, outside the impressive adoption rates for SharePoint in corporate America today, the story ends up being mostly about the "bad and the ugly" from a feature perspective. SharePoint is good at some things and not so good at others, which is not unlike other products. When it comes to mashups, I think it falls somewhere in the bad-to-ugly area.

I think it is very important to realize, especially for an organization that is hoping to capitalize on SharePoint as part of their Web 2.0 initiatives, that Sharepoint's out-of-the box feature set simply does *not* support dynamic integration of disparate information sources, nor is it an open, cross-platform solution.

We think alot about Mashups and SharePoint here at JackBe. The dynamic integration capability of Enterprise Mashups is critical for leveraging SharePoint to its fullest. Not coincidentally, we are in the middle of a 10-part blog series on Mashups for Sharepoint that includes such topics as:

- SharePoint Mashups using standard SharePoint Web Parts
- SharePoint Mashups using Custom-built SharePoint Web Parts
- Using C# and ASP.NET UI Controls to build Mashup Applications in SharePoint

Presto, JackBe's Award Winning Enterprise Mashup Platform, lets you create mashups that are reusable within and across Microsoft and non-Microsoft environments, including reuse of the same mashups within SharePoint and your Enterprise Portal. These mashups are secure and governed, working within your company's access control and Single-Sign-On (SSO) infrastructure, and focus on user-driven solutions that support more rapid and more intelligent decision making.

SharePoint may not be the one-stop shop for your mashup needs but you can add enterprise-grade mashups safely and efficiently. You can try out Presto Mashups for SharePoint through our free Developer Edition from our Mashup Developer Community and be up and running immediately doing SharePoint mashups.

I encourage you to give Enterprise Mashups on SharePoint a try and let us know what you think! And if you'll be at SPTechCon (The SharePoint Technology Conference in Boston on June 22-24), stop by our booth for a demo and one-on-one tech-talk.

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Defining Enterprise Mashups

A few weeks ago JackBe’s CEO and Co-Founder, Luis Derechin, had the opportunity to represent the Web 2.0 industry on a major television network. When mainstream media outlets like Fox Business News start giving your product and your industry primetime coverage, you know you've passed a milestone.

During the interview, Luis was asked to describe ‘what that is’ and to give a ‘mainstream example’. Now I am not here to critique my boss (I am not that foolhardy). But I will tell you that Luis thinks he could have done a better job of defining enterprise mashups in a meaningful way for the uninitiated, non-technical business audience. So the boss asked his team to noodle it and that’s the topic I am interested in discussing here. How do you define ‘enteprise mashup’?
The simple word ‘mashup’ is complicated enough. You’d think with all the media and analyst coverage that there would be a simple, unified definition. Sadly, you’d be wrong on that one.

There are almost as many uses of the word ‘mashup’ as there are experts. And the term is all too common outside the high-tech industry as well. It’s popular in the world of music remix (this is where the word originated, in fact) but I’ve also seen it used by everyone from Sports Illustrated to the coupon-clipping Mashup Mom. I’ve even seen the word used on the back of a children's cereal box.

And it gets more complicated once you add the word ‘enterprise’ to the mix. When defining the enteprise mashups, it just doesn’t seem sufficient to say that ‘it’s a mashup in the enterprise’. A self-referential definition like that only seems to lead to more questions. It’d be more useful to have a self-supporting definition, I think.

Almost 2 years ago we went to great lengths to define a mashup. Today, with 2 years of enterprise mashup implementation experience behind us, we often say that enterprise mashups are:

‘Dynamic web-based applications that combine multiple data sources in real-time for increased awareness and improved decision-making while meeting the stringent governance and data security requirements of enterprises.’

Not bad, I think. But we need something a bit sexier for the next time we end up on TV. Remember, our goal is to craft something for the non-techy, the non-insider, the uninitiated. In a recent Twitter conversation with Web 2.0 Strategist Dion Hinchcliffe I gave him the 140-character definition: ‘Web 2.0 meets Excel’. His reply: ‘Now define Web 2.0’. Fair enough, we gotta find a definition that is not just for the insiders.

How about defining enterprise mashups by example? JackBe has no shortage of ‘Mashups in Action’, including projects in government (the Defense Intelligence Agency), publishing (Thomson Reuters), shipping/logistics (Inttra), and banking (Accival), to name a few. But I’d hate to use any single example for fear of having the listener pigeonhole enteprise mashups into one or two industries.

We could define mashups by exclusion. For instance, mashups are not ESBs, BI, portals or fancy spreadsheets. Enterprise mashups complement all of these technologies, certainly, but they have distinct qualities from these technologies that set them apart.  Unfortunately for our purposes today, I think the list of 'nots' is too long and cumbersome to be a useful defining tool.

Last, there is the always the ‘do nothing’ option. In other words, we could use the now-famous (but somewhat paraphrased) quote from late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, ‘I can't define it, but I know it when I see it!’.

Somehow I don’t think my boss would think of this last as my best effort. So, let me punt it to you… How do you define an enterprise mashup?

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Update 03-12-2009: We've had so many great responses to this topic that we started a 'Beat the CEO' contest on our Mashup Community: http://www.jackbe.com/enterprise-mashup/blog/announcing-beat-ceo-contest.  Define 'enterprise mashups' for the beginner.  Our weekly favorites get a $50 Amazon gift card and the honorary title of 'Mashup CEO'.

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