November 25, 2007

2008: the year of the "enterprise mashup service"

During our seminars on service-oriented architectures (again scheduled in 2008 because of their huge success), there was a lot of discussion about how this SOA solution will interact with its users. In other words, will the trend towards flexible architectures also influence the way we deliver applications in the future ?

The answer is probably yes: the services of the SOA will be combined with other services from external partners and external data sources to deliver the information that the user needs. These so-called mashups are still highly experimental and overhyped, but there is a big chance that reliable, robust and secure "enterprise mashup services" will be the buzzword of 2008.

Anyone who wants to track the success of mashups should take a look at ProgrammableWeb, where you can find out what's new and interesting with mashups, new applications, new APIs, and about the Web 2.0 as a Platform. For the moment, there are not a lot of very useful enterprise mashups, even in the category "Enterprise Mashups", among the more than 2500 mashups that are listed there.

When you try out some of the mashups at ProgrammableWeb, you will see some of the problems and challenges facing mashups:


  • Reliability and robustness: when a service is unavailable, every mashup that relies on this service, gets broken - when we browsed, I think 10% of the mashups had this problem

  • Data quality and governance: the quality of a mashup is only as good as the quality of the services it uses - and some are really bad

  • Security and privacy: although there are no real cases of public mashups that use private, secure services known to us, it will be a big challenge to implement single sign-on and federation in such a loosely coupled environment.

  • Dion Hinchcliffe has many more challenges in his Enterprise 2.0 weblog entry.

I.T. Works will continue to track this evolution in application delivery, and we will probably organise a seminar about "enterprise mashups" in 2008. Particularly the "how to build an industry-strength mashup", the impact that such tools may have on business analysis, and the use of tools such as lower-level Microsoft Popfly or Yahoo Pipes, or higher-level Serena Business Mashup Composer or Openkapow's Robomaker would be very useful parts of such a seminar.

Hence, we are interested to hear from your experiences with mashup applications, API's, tools, etc. Just email us at mashupseminars@itworks.be.

Posted by admin at November 25, 2007 12:22 AM
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