This is my first blog for the eBizQ Enterprise Mashups Blog Series. By way of introduction, I guess I can simply say that I am lucky enough to get the chance to talk with organizations of every size, shape and motivation. I get to hear about their goals and I get to help them strategize about ways to meet those goals with enterprise mashups. Through the Enterprise Mashups Blog Series I hope to share those experiences with you in a way that will help you understand the nature and uses of mashups in your enterprise.
I'll write about everything to do with Enterprise Mashups, from mashups-in-action to the ways mashups relate to common enterprise applications and technologies like SOA, portals, BI, and the like. I'll also try to distill some of the more important technical aspects of mashups (like security, governance, performance and management) as well as the softer, more social aspects of mashups. And I hope you tell me your thoughts and interests as well, so I can tailor this blog to you.
So let the mashup games begin!
As you might know, 'mashup' is a term made popular by DJs who combined multiple songs into a single dance track. This subgenre is so popular that there are even 'Top 10' lists for music mashups, like http://www.mashup-charts.com/. So, around about 2005 Google announced Google Maps and showed the world how you can "mashup" multiple sets of information on a map. And thus was born the consumer mashup craze. Sites like http://www.housingmaps.com/ were overnight successes because they were wicked easy to create and filled a need, albeit one we didn't necessarily know we had.
For quite a while, however, the term "mashup" was synonymous with "stuff on a map". Then in 2007 enterprise software analysts like Forrester and Gartner as well as Web 2.0 strategists like Dion Hinchcliffe started talking about 'Enterprise Mashups'. They described the new phrase as consumer mashups except that the mashing was happening behind the firewall. And equally important, they pointed out something we take for granted now: the mashups aren't necessarily limited to the confines of a map-based display but can be delivered to all the rich presentation tools and techniques that enterprises use already. Think Excel, portals, Crystal Reports, Ajax, Flash, Flex, and Java and you start to get the idea.
And one of the more important aspects of enterprise mashups, these experts explained, was the expectations of enterprise-grade security, oversight and reliability that enterprises have of their core software technologies. In other words, 'enterprise' mashups had to live by the same rules as other 'enterprise' technologies, in spite of their music and consumer heritage. If the Chicago Crime mashup goes offline for an hour, the Chicago Police Department will still catch the bad guys. But your Datacenter Monitoring and Security Mashup (like this cool demo built by the folks at EMC) has to be highly-available or you are playing with fire.
Below is just a sampling of some of the specific "stuff" I hear enterprises discuss when planning for technologies like mashups. In future posts I'll be covering all these various elements along with supporting patterns, best practices, and real-world examples that show how mashups are making their way into the government and corporate world.
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