Standards body, tech stalwarts look to fuel the growth of enterprise mashups.
Mashups first came to prominence among social and consumer Web users who were looking to make the most of the Web 2.0 technology at their fingertips. Enterprises were quick to see the business benefits of turning various data sources into services and “mashing” them together on an ad-hoc basis into unique applications without the need for complex coding.
Essentially, mashups create the opportunity for non-technical business users to very quickly develop situational applications for their own unique requirements. That’s why Gartner predicts mashups will soon become the dominant model for the creation of new enterprise applications. “Because mashups can be created quickly and easily, they create possibilities for a new class of short-term or disposable applications that would not normally attract development dollars,” said Gartner Fellow David Cearley. “The ability to combine information into a common dashboard or visualize it using geo-location or mapping software is extremely powerful.”
An example is a mashup that combines real estate data from Craigslist with Google maps, allowing a user to view the location of each advertised property without having to search for it himself. The result is a new and distinct Web API that was not originally provided by either source.
Rapid Growth Expected
A new report from the tech research firm Business Insights predicts that the enterprise mashup market, worth around $161 million in 2008, will expand more than tenfold to $1.74 billion by 2013. The firm estimates that roughly one-third (32.8 percent) of the organizations it interviewed already use business mashups.
Business Insights says the growing involvement of major technology players will help drive market growth. In fact, heavy hitters such as IBM, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! have already invested heavily in the mashup space with the development of highly accessible and easy-to-use mashup creation tools.
As with any emerging technology, the development of standards that ensure a high level of interoperability and portability is essential to market growth, particularly in the enterprise space. To that end, a number of software vendors, consulting companies, technology service providers and industry leaders recently created the Open Mashup Alliance (OMA) to promote the development and adoption of the free-to-use Enterprise Mashup Markup Language (EMML) for enterprise mashup offerings. Charter members of the OMA include Adobe, HP, Intel, Bank of America, Capgemini, Hinchcliffe & Co., JackBe, Kapow Technologies, Programmable Web, Synteractive and Xignite.
The EMML specification will be governed under the Creative Commons License and supported by a free-to-use EMML reference runtime engine. The OMA will steward and enhance the EMML v1.0 specification for future contribution to a standards body.
Opening Up
“For enterprise mashups to take hold, we need to remove the ‘vendor lock-in’ concerns raised by today’s proprietary toolsets. We also need to inspire the innovative minds of the open-source community to start working in this space. By establishing an open standard for mashups, the OMA and EMML address both of these issues,” said Michael Ogrinz, principal architect at Bank of America and author of the book “Mashup Patterns.”
The EMML specification, along with a supporting runtime reference implementation, documentation and sample code, is available on the OMA Web site, www.openmashup.org.
“The Open Mashup Alliance offers organizations a proven, standardized model that will help increase mashup adoption in organizations, increase flexibility and choice in agile integration scenarios, and reduce the risk and cost for many kinds of IT projects,” said Dion Hinchcliffe, founder of Web 2.0 University and president of Hinchcliffe and Co.
