41% of you need to read this

When analysts talk, people listen. I am proud to say that JackBe is no exception. For example, we recently heard that a recent Forrester survey of 262 US IT decision-makers revealed ‘41% have never heard of mashups’. Based on this, Larry Dignan at ZDNet recommended companies like JackBe ‘start talking to CIOs and technology decision makers’. To this marketer’s ears, that's all the marching orders I need.

Coincidentally, JackBe has had the opportunity to perform a simple survey of our own in the past few months. We asked over 1,200 people some very simple questions about enterprise mashups. The responses are striking, particularly in light of Forrester’s survey.

The first question was fundamentally simple and the overall response was encouraging:


And of the 49% that replied ‘Yes’, over 1/2 of them are going about their implementation in the next 12 months.

The second question has the potential to be even more instructive: ‘Could you briefly describe the business problem Enterprise Mashups will address for you?’. We received hundreds of distinct answers to this query (we published a few in the distant past). Here’s are some notable replies. (Note: we tried not to wordsmith these responses, so you can picture these real-world examples as they are imagined by their owners.)

For vertical/industry use...

Manufacturing

1. Consolidate a large volume of data created by R&D scientists and a wafer fabricator to understand metrics that can improve R&D tool utilization and time-to-market.


2. System performance monitoring and customer service support for electronic products.

Government

1. Develop desktop and mobile real-time collaborative situational awareness applications for DOD, Public Safety, and Emergency Management.


2. Tie together an ESRI GIS system and a 311 citizen call center CRM app for flexible graphical reporting to county managers.

Education

1. Enable students to combine disparate information resources into digital learning objects


2. Aid upper management and executive decisions by providing better financial and service usage information about the many departments within Campus Life.

For horizontal/functional use...

Support/Enhance Existing Information Technology

1. SOA/BPM extended to power users.


2. Various operational data sources and BI reporting solutions with high-cost interfaces and integration points for data consolidation.


3. Portal replacement.


4. Address limitations in existing IT systems to address strategic and operational business pain points emerging due to inefficient data work flow between applications.


5. Address supply chain management and demand forecasting challenges resulting from upstream data definition and propagation issues.


6. Combining Portal and Data Warehouse Reporting elements.


7. 10 Year old legacy backends, not able to interface to modern supplier organizations.

Financial/Executive Information/Analysis

1. Dynamically merge top line data from key organizational functions like billing information, new business requests information, staff timesheets, accounting bottom lines, etc, in short/small packets to make constant decisions.


2. Treasury Risk Management.


3. Tax code integration.

Web 2.0-Style Employee Enablement

1. Allowing business people to create their own set of information and services based on well managed services to solve their individual problems.


2. Knowledge Management and Actionable decision dashboards.

I think JackBe’s survey results shows that there is a cadre of IT decision-makers that are well past the ‘never heard of mashups’ stage. I propose that this group is also past the subsequent ‘what can it do for me’ stage, and well into the ‘how do I get it done’ stage.

I expect the difference between Forrester’s survey results and JackBe’s survey results is simply a matter of the survey audience. JackBe surveyed folks through our website, so our surveyees have likely already gotten past the ‘what’s a mashup?’ question. Heck, that’s what most of our website is all about!

In spite of these facts, however, there are still many out there (including some of you reading this blog, perhaps) that might not get the gist of an enterprise mashup. So, if you are in that 41% ‘never heard of mashups’ group, I’ve got a few recommendations for you:

1. Do some reading. Blogs can help cut through the hype and get to the real value and substance of mashups. Our Blog Roll (in the sidebar) has links to a few blogger we find particularly insightful.


2. Do some playing. When it comes to mashups, the best learning tools are hands-on demonstrations, as they tend to be relatively hype-free. (JackBe's demos are here.)


3. Check out what the experts are saying. There are many. For example, Gartner, Forrester, Hinchcliffe and McKendrick have been very active in their coverage of enterprise mashups in the last year.


4. Get your hands dirty. JackBe has a Trial of our Presto Enterprise Mashup solution and, if you must, so do some of our competitors.

Serendipitously, JackBe also recently announced a ‘Learn from the Experts’ series of whitepapers and webcasts. As a start, I’d recommend ‘An Executive Guide to Mashups in the Enterprise’ by Dion Hinchcliffe. It’s a good way to get out of that 41%.

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Enterprise Mashup Security 101

Gartner published a report recently on Web 2.0 security, ‘Security Features Should Be Built Into Web 2.0 Applications’, a follow-up to their November 2006 ‘Web 2.0 Needs Security 101'. Excerpting straight from the more recent report: ‘The distributed and dynamic nature of Web 2.0 complicates security protection for enterprises and individuals.’ Understated, to say the least.

So this got me thinking on the unsexy-but-critical topic of mashup security. We have posted in the past about ‘Confidence’ and ‘Governance’, but these have generally been non-specific. So let me try to get a bit practical. The question isn’t a simple one but it is certainly worth noodling: How do we execute mashups safely in the context of the enterprise?

I think we are all aware of the security landscape today. On the technology level alone, security is a messy word of old and new systems that do or do not have any connection to corporate monitoring, authentication, authorization, and logging solutions. And it gets even more complicated once you add the ever-changing set of mandated and self-imposed privacy and data control policies and regulations. You can begin to understand why Enterprise Security Architects don’t get much sleep.

Mashups must play nicely in this complicated security ecosystem. For the sake of this discussion, let’s use this working definition of a mashup: ‘an enterprise mashup is a user-driven micro-integration of internal and external data’. From this definition, we can extract the following important security meta-requirements:

1. Mashups are often created by ‘end-users’ themselves;
2. Mashups can be shared with others who may be outside the firewall;
3. Mashups can be created from disparate sources which may be outside the firewall;
4. Mashups can be created from disparate sources which may be of disparate interface formats (RSS, REST, WSDL, and SQL Databases, most likely).

Generally, meeting these meta-requirements can get very complicated very quickly. But it can’t be done as an afterthought! You must be proactive and persistent. Based on these meta-requirements, I’d propose the following Enterprise Mashup Security Guidelines.

1. Entitle and Propagate. Your enterprise mashup must manage the user authentication inherently, delegate the credentials the appropriate identity management system and all mashed-up services. Your enterprise mashup solution must also allow the mashup creator to specify desired entitlements. And all of this must be treated uniformly and seamlessly when mashing up internal and external services.
2. Standardized but Agile. Your enterprise mashup must propagate credentials in the format the source services require. And this security/credential propagation must be built into the architecture because standards are weak here. Of the four service types, only JDBC/ODBC compliant databases and WSDL (via WS-SecurityPolicy) have a somewhat ‘standard’ credentials format, albeit ill-adopted. Therefore, your enterprise mashups must have the flexibility to pass user credentials in whatever form the service providers require, perhaps leaving a placeholder for new standards or custom formats.
3. Portable and Syndicatable. Mashups and mashlets provide the portability for mashups to be syndicated. Imagine your mashlet embedded in a Web 1.0 portal such as BEA and Oracle Portal or in a Web 2.0 interface such as Netvibes, Pageflakes, or your iPhone, that mashup widget must maintain portable security and governance no matter where it goes.

Enterprise Mashups have the potential to be the technology equivalent of the Wild West. Follow the Guidelines and you’ve got yourself a sheriff. Ignore the Guidelines and you could get yourself some quality time in the pokey.

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Mashupnomics

'If you torture numbers long enough, you can get them to say just about anything...'
-- Original Author Unknown

I am a Mathematics geek by training (Carnegie-Mellon University, class of 1990) and still have a big fixation with numbers today. And I am proud to say that I've used my skills to turn a mathematical equation into a memory trick, one I've been befuddling my coworkers with for days:

600,000,000 + 8.4 + 5 + 10 = ?

The answer is 'Enterprise Mashups', of course. More accurately, it's a Reader's Digest list of a number of notable events you might want to take note of. In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya, 'Lemme esplain':

• 600,000,000 is the number of service calls our partner, Xignite, gets every month for financial information. I heard this number for the first time in our joint webcast with Xignite yesterday, 'Enterprise Mashup Boot Camp: What, Why and How?', and it's a number I will not soon forget. If you didn't think hosted business information services were coming of age, this should put that idea to rest. (And if you missed the webcast, we've got a whole slew of them in the next few months!)
• 8.4 is the rating JackBe received in a recent InfoWorld review, 'Refining the art of enterprise Web apps'. JackBe has worked very hard for the last 2 years to evolve from a simple Ajax provider to an enterprise-class mashup vendor. This kind of review makes us very proud and, we think, validates the results of our efforts. And we're already hard at work on the next generation of enterprise mashup features (some of which you may have seen us preview at AjaxWorld last month), which we're confident will put us even further ahead of our competition.
• 5 is the number of 'must haves' for enterprise mashups that we outlined in an ECommerce Times article, 'Making Mashups Work in the Enterprise'. We 've talked a bit about the 5C Framework in the past and this article gives it even more depth.
• 10 is the number of Gartner’s top technologies for 2008 and, no surprise, mashups make the list. To steal straight from the column, 'Gartner outlined its top 10 strategic technology areas for 2008 and many roads lead to service oriented architecture'. Definitely worth a read.

I think I've tortured the numbers enough for one day. I hope my mother reads this and finally sees that my math degree wasn't wasted.

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Talking Mashups with Elvis, Caesar, and Gartner

It's only Thursday morning, and I've already had a pretty full week. I got to stay at 'The Second Home of Elvis'. I got to eat with Caesar. And I got to hang out with 20+ Gartner analysts. Where was I? I was at GartnerPalooza (my name, not theirs!), three concurrent Gartner Summits in Las Vegas: 'Portals, Content & Collaboration', 'Web Innovations', and 'Open Source'. For those of you who weren't lucky enough to be there and lose money at the blackjack table like me, I thought you might like a summary of at least a few of the mashup-related items from the event.

First and foremost, it a bit exciting to note mashups are now officially at the peak of the Gartner 'Hype Cycle'. This is interesting as mashups were unheard of a mere 18 months ago and have now leap-frogged some notable but apparently slower trends. On a related front, there are also 3 recent Gartner reports that cover the enterprise mashup world: 'Who's Who in Enterprise 'Mashup' Technologies', 'Reference Architecture for Enterprise 'Mashups'', and ''Mashups' and Their Relevance to the Enterprise'. You might want to check them out if you are a Gartner subscriber and, if not, check out the ZapThink note on our website, 'JackBe Platform for Enterprise Mashups'.

I've made note in the recent past that mashups are hand-in-glove with SOA efforts. Interestingly, Ray Valdes seems to agree and goes one step further, describing mashups as a means to fulfill some of the unkept promises of enterprise portals. Mashups, along with a supporting SOA effort, can bring elements of self-fulfillment and simplicity that are lacking in the enterprise portal packages today, he says. While I don't think I do it justice here, Ray weaves mashups, SOA, and portals together in a compelling, synergistic way.

David Gootzit talked about the 'Portal of the Future' and mashups are a key actor in the tale he told. David described portals as an 'important' entry point for enterprise mashups. More interestingly, he outlined key areas that must be addressed for mashups to become to a first-class portal citizen (like user profiles, security, metadata and portlets) and guidelines to deploying mashups.

And there was more mashup talking to be done. Unfortunately, I had to come home to get ready for AjaxWorld. Which means I am missing Anthony Bradley's session on mashups tomorrow, among others. If anyone has comments on that, I'd love to hear them.

Oh, and Elvis says hi. Stop by his place if you get the chance.

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The Fifth Level of Ajax

I think that all Ajax vendors have been touting the benefits of 'improved user experience' as their value proposition for a while. The problem with this proposition is that it is very hard to quantify.

But, they are missing something. It isn't just about the "experience" but about empowering the user with a better view and access to any data source. Consider the "Four Levels of Ajax Adoption" from Ray Valdez at Gartner. Ray has said that the levels are:

1. Snippets
2. Widgets
3. Client Framework
4. Client-Server Framework

I think Ray is missing the next level. The 5th level should be 'User-driven Framework', a framework that has all of the benefits of level 4 but allows the user to be the one pulling and mashing any information that exists in the enterprise, the trusted partner's enterprise and the Web. This may seem to be a small difference, but in reality it is the difference between 'improved user experience' and 'improved access to information which gives the true competitive advantage'. And to most business users, that's an important distinction.

So, we suggest the 'Five Levels of Ajax Adoption' :

1. Snippets
2. Widgets
3. Client Framework
4. Client-Server Framework
5. User-Driven Framework
   

JackBe has embraced this idea through its new products, Dash, our dynamic interface for user-driven mashups, and Edge, our virtualization and mashup server. This is an emerging area and one we'll be talking about a lot in 2007.

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