When it comes to Enterprise Mashups…don’t listen to me!

“Never become so much of an expert that you stop gaining expertise. View life as a continuous learning experience.” -- Denis Waitley

Over the last few months I have learned that a lot of my thoughts on Enterprise Mashups were wrong. And you must understand that this is a difficult thing to admit. As the company that invented the first Enterprise Mashup Platform, Presto, we were certain that we had all of the right answers to the question of ‘what is an enterprise Mashup and what kind of value do they create?’.

Most cognoscenti consider their opinions to be relatively unassailable when it comes to the topic on which they are experts. In my case, my belief in myself began to unravel in the most unlikely of places: on national TV. When I appeared on Fox Business Channel I was asked to explain what a mashup. As some of you know, I did not do a very good job at it.

So, as the saying goes, the first step in fixing a problem is realizing you have one. We knew that we didn’t have the best answers, so I had my team set out on a journey to discover better ways to share the mashup story through definitions, use cases and the like. We set out on what I called a “mash-about” (named after the aboriginal “walk-about”).

We tried many things to get the answers we needed. Some were innovative, some were wacky, some were unproductive, and all of them were at least a bit self-deprecating. Afterall, we were the experts and yet we were asking laymen to help us write our ‘story’. It’s crowd-sourcing at it’s finest, I think. And it’s been quite a revealing journey.

In our first effort, the "Beat the CEO” contest, we challenged people to provide a better definition. And the “Mashup “Tribe” (that’s YOU) came through with some great insights. There were metaphors, technical descriptions, short answers and long ones, and much, much more.

Next we hosted the “Explain it on the back of a business card” contest. Can you explain what a mashup is using only the whitespace on the back of a business card? I am happy to report that almost 100 graphics artists did. Who knew there were so many ways to describe a mashup by a simple picture?

Finally, we invested time in listening to our customers, our prospective customers, our partners, our competitors (some of them, at least), and the 3,000+ members of our Mashup Developer Community. There were literally thousands of lessons to be learned from the things they were doing with mashups.

And we took all this input and grouped it all into three areas of interest: ‘WHAT is an Enterprise Mashup?’, ‘HOW do you do create an Enterprise Mashup?’, and ‘WHY should an organization care about mashups?’. Since you’ve read this far, I expect you’d be interested in the results:

WHAT (is an Enterprise Mashup):

Enterprise Mashups are secure, visually rich web applications that expose actionable information from diverse internal and external information sources.

We tried to simplify the definition as much as possible so we focused on what we thought were the four most important elements:

• Secure – We’ve written about the common secure requirements for mashups before. Without this set of capabilities, you’ll never get past the enterprise front door.


• Visually rich – Mashups can certainly be published as a data service using a format like RSS or WSDL. But we’ve found that they more often end as visual representations (often personalized or customized by the mashup consumer) that lets users better understand the data and make informed decisions.


• Actionable – The dictionary defines “actionable” as “relating to or being information that allows a decision to be made or action to be taken”. We’re talking about data that a knowledge worker can understand and which doesn’t require lots of processing.


• Internal and external – Mashups provide aggregation and manipulation of information from many sources (inside and outside the firewall). Many people wrongly assume that they focus on one or the other when in practice they are typically a mix of both.

This definition usually lets people ‘get it’. And then their next comment is “OK, that sounds cool, but why should I care? Why would an organization invest time and money on this?”.

The “Mashup Tribe” was very clear in telling us that mashups let them solve what is often called “The Decision-Makers Dilemma”: Poor decisions are often made because decision-makers do not have the right information at the right time. This Dilemma is created by a combination of 4 situations that can be found in just about every complex organization:

• Data is frequently ‘siloed’ or isolated in data stores inaccessible to users across an organization.


• Combining disparate data sources manually is labor-intensive, time consuming and error-prone.


• IT rarely has the time, budget or human resources to address individual user’s needs.


• The inability to securely share information with peers leads to redundant work and inconsistent results.

So, we gathered our thoughts to define WHY (do you need an Enterprise Mashup):

Poor decisions are often made because decision-makers do not have the right information at the right time. Enterprise Mashups deliver new insights and enable better decisions through personalized access to the right, real-time information for the specific problem at hand.

In other words, organizations achieve value by allowing individuals to glean new insights by putting the right data together at the right time for the right situation. This empowers people with much better information about what they care, when it matters and in a way that makes sense to them.

These benefits peak people’s interest and it usually leads to the next question “what’s the best way to create enterprise mashups?” Rather than saying “buy my product”, we thought it of more value to describe the characteristics of a REAL Enterprise Mashup Platform (EMP), as there are many impostors who want you to believe that they offer 'Mashups' while in fact they offer something else entirely. So, we concluded that the following describes the benefits an Enterprise Mashup Platform has over existing integration and BI technology for creating mashups.

HOW (can you create an Enterprise Mashup):

An EMP is a technology suite that enables the rapid, collaborative, user-driven creation of Enterprise Mashups without the complexities, costs and risks of traditional information integration projects.

Like our definition of enterprise mashup, we focused on a few key components of an EMP:

• ‘rapid, collaborative, user-driven creation’ – Enterprise Mashup Platforms should allow users and developers to work together to rapidly create a mashup that complies with their business needs. This isn’t an IT-only effort. Furthermore, an EMP allows the re-use of components to get even faster results in future situations. Is there’s no re-usability of the mashups you are making, you are simply building another application silo.


• ‘without the complexities, costs and risks of traditional information integration projects’ – Mashups are designed to be quickly built, quickly used, and quickly shared. And they have an extremely small ‘footprint’ themselves, requiring no datastore but instead consuming directly from source databases/services/APIs/documents. That’s how you can avoid the ‘complexities, costs and risks’.

There you have it, the ‘What, Why and How’ of Enterprise Mashups. But don’t listen to me. Listen to hundreds of people who collaborated on our mash-about -- our customers, partners, and community members –- as they are the experts and they have taught us plenty about Enterprise Mashups. I am glad we were listening and I can promise you that this is one expert who will continue to do so!

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