ActiveGrid: How Mashups Complement SOAs - First Look

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December 21, 2006
ActiveGrid: How Mashups Complement SOAs

Web 2.0 Data mashups are to SOA what NASCAR is to automobile production -- a much faster, more free-flowing, results-oriented way of combining complementary components into new applications that have an advantage over traditional months-long application development or production cycles.

And they seem to be rivaling NASCAR in popularity as large, medium and small software companies are all offering mashups. At the forefront of the movement is San Francisco-based software company ActiveGrid, which is offering free on-site "Build Days" to qualifying companies to deploy their mashups.

“The key advantage is the speed to which business-driving applications can be delivered to the end user base within the organization,” said Todd Hay, ActiveGrid’s Vice President of Marketing and Business Development. “Their customers and their salespeople can get the information they need immediately instead of waiting for the long term, long-run enterprise integration technologies to finish.”

Hay went on to describe how ActiveGrid:

--Leverages a firm’s existing techniques to ensure security, reliability and scalability while “still giving them the flexible, easy-to-use and fast-to-deliver front ends the Web 2.0 or mashup world has driven.”

--Provides the tools to allow developers to quickly build applications out of the services and out of capabilities being delivered by giants like IBM, Microsoft and eBay.

-- Disptaches their top engineers to a company to show them how ActiveGrid “can very quickly solve their business problems on their turf with their technologies. And that has been a very effective approach for us.”

--Enabled one manufacturing giant in the Midwest to pull marketing information out of a number of their field databases and create a marketing analytics application that allows them to create corporate-wide marketing campaigns across their global presence of retail manufacturing outlets.

For mashups, rapid delivery, rapid iteration and extendibility according to end users’ needs are the key requirements, Hay noted.

“I do see mashups as the logical evolution of where Web services were trying to go and where the Web was trying to go; service oriented architectures in general have been laying the groundwork for this for years,” Hay said. “We’ve now just advanced the technologies to the point where it is delivering on those promises.

Hay added his thoughts on the ideal, complimentary balance between an SOA and mashups:

“A large customer or ours was very excited that ActiveGrid can come in and start building Web 2.0 AJAX-enabled mashups based on their existing databases and some external Web Services. And as they build out a large SOA infrastructure from the back end with the governance and repositories they’re talking about; they can migrate and leverage those applications moving forward.”