Is there a market for enterprise mash?

Mashups are a hot topic among consumer content providers and others struggling to find revenue from the Internet. For the uninitiated or semi-conscious, a mashup if the amalgamation of different online data to create new usefulness. Zillow is the newest and most popular concept, bridging pubic record data on home sales with satellite photographs, and offering a pictorial view of how one's homestead is faring as a personal piggybank.

Combining previously isolated data to create new insight has been the hallmark of IT software since Moses was in short pants. But IT software is often impenetrable, written using incompatible technologies, siloed in dissimilar databases, and undocumented to the point of uselessness. The effort to bridge any two pieces of highly relevant information has been so painful that it was only attempted when there was provable economic value to the enterprise, or when the CIO's medication wore off.

The Weird Wide Web is not thusly hampered. People are creating mashups for the sheer sport of it, and because a lot of content providers are using service oriented architectures (SOA) to make mashups easier to construct. Even semi skilled, and semi erect programmers can cobble together a web site that borrows on-the-fly content from Google, Amazon, Yahoo and others to create new value from seemingly disconnected data.

And that may just be the hot, new IT software market - Enterprise Mashups (copyright 2006, Guy Smith, all rights reserved, so send royalty checks directly to me).

SOA adoption in the enterprise is still nascent, an the Enterprise Mashups are a prophesy. But enterprises have a distinct advantage in that they can (and will) expose more corporate data through SOA as part of cross-application integration efforts. With very little extra thought and/or work, generalized services can be created that may not have any current use, but which will be available for consideration by other developers. Thus new capabilities and insights may well be garnered by in-house or third party developers mashing together data that either nobody had before contemplated, or which had been just too darn difficult.

And herein are the markets for Enterprise Mashups:

• Packaged application mashups: Add-on tools that exploit services exposed by well known ERP, CRM, m-o-u-s-e packages to create new business dashboards, ad-hoc investigations, and even business processes.
• Internal/external mashups: Tying together public services from the Internet and services from packaged or in-house software.
• Business facing external mashups: Combining publicly available services into information abstractions useful to business.
• Internal mashups: Mainly a services play where business consultants create necessary data aggregations from internal services to create specific in-house competitive value.
• Portals: Create a generalized mashup portal, or rent one out ala Software as a Service (SaaS).

The genesis for each of these approaches is most likely to be based on industry verticals -- uniting information to create more meaningful insights is almost always uniquely tied to the type of industry consuming the data. There will be horizontal plays where broad swatches of information are combined for universal purposes (human resources planning is an example). But industries that live and die by data, that have specific data services, and thus can create unique mashups . . . they will be prime targets for generating demand.

Now, where did I put that XML reference manual?


Guy Smith is the chief consultant for Silicon Strategies . Guy brings a combination of technical, managerial and marketing experience to Silicon Strategies projects. Directly and as a consultant, Guy has worked with a variety of technology-producing organizations. A partial list of these technology firms include ORBiT Group (high-availability backup software), Telamon (wireless middleware), Wink Communications (interactive television), VA Software (enterprise software), SUSE (Linux distributions and applications) and Novell.