The Enterprise Web 2.0 Blog

It wouldn't be the holidays without retrospection and resolutions. Looking back, 2007 could reasonably be named Year of the User. Web 2.0 was everywhere. And mashups were a big part of the story. What was a consumer-based technology a year ago is now earning its enterprise chops. In less than a year mashups have gone from a niche, emergent concept to the very top of the Gartner hype cycle. As for JackBe, we are very proud of the contributions we made to mashup industry in 2007, like our C5 Enterprise Mashup Framework, our Enterprise Mashup Markup Language, our Mashup API, and our WSRP-compliant ‘Mashlets’.

To help wrap 2007 up in a nice, shiny package, here’s a compilation of our favorite blogs, articles, books and columns about mashups in the enterprise.

1. Wall Street Journal, ‘Mashups’ Sew Data Together. A business-focused article that brings mashups back to reality with a few good examples of mashups in action. It’s a shame we didn’t get a mention.

2. Dion Hinchcliffe, The top10 challenges facing enterprise mashups. Always a solid voice of reason, Dion tempers the mashup hype with real, practical issues to consider.

3. Gartner, 'Mashups' and Their Relevance to the Enterprise. As usual with Gartner, here's a hype-free summary of ‘what and why’ of enterprise mashups.

4. Gartner (again), Reference Architecture for Enterprise 'Mashups’. A good, practical compliment to their ‘Relevance’ note. We’re very proud to say JackBe’s Presto maps to this architecture quite well.

5. JackBe, Mashups: Moving SOA Out of the Back Office. Moving past the glad-handing, we outlined some real connection patterns between SOA and mashups. (Yeah, we liked our own work.)

6. BusinessWeek, When Companies Do the Mash. Great real-world examples, even if a few of them ain’t exactly mashing.

7. Mulholland, Thomas & Kurchina, Mashup Corporations: The End of Business as Usual. ‘A hypothetical company that achieves a transformation based on SOA.’ A good story that connects technology with organizational evolution.

8. SD Times, To Define What a Mashup Is. An article ahead of its time; worth re-reading just to see what a difference 8 months can make in a fast-moving industry.

9. eWeek, 10 Things You Should Know About Enterprise Mashups. JackBe may not agree with all 10 points, but eWeek does create a simple set of issues to consider when ya start noodling on mashups.

I think you’d agree that most of these move past the ‘hype’ into practical rules, techniques, and examples that can really enhance an enterprise mashup effort.

Looking back and looking forward are traditional activities this time of year. But the holidays are also about giving. And while we’d love to give each and every one of you a gift, we going to start with just a couple of people and a couple of iPods. Of the hundreds of respondents to JackBe’s Mashup Survey, we are pleased to announce that Kevin Sommer and Herman Steinroetter will get a nice shiny iPod under their nondenominational holiday tree/wreath/menorah. Congrats to both of them. The rest of you will just have to be satisfied with that Wii raincheck.

And what about 2008? JackBe has one simple resolution: more enterprise mashup innovations. It should be a very exciting year. Happy holidays!

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I spent last week at Oracle OpenWorld with Larry Ellison and 43,000 of his closest friends. At the event JackBe announced support for Oracle Fusion Middleware, most notably Oracle Portal and Webcenter. Our announcement was based upon our newest mashup innovation: a powerful connection between mashups and portals in the form of a WSRP-compliant 'mashlet' connecting to our mashup API and using a portal-friendly single-signon paradigm via an LDAP authentication server. (We've got videos demonstrating this on JackBe TV and we'll be demonstrating it live on our November 29th webcast, 'Mashing the Corporate Portal'). As we've talked about many times in the past, mashups don't live alone. Mashups let the users bring together disparate information sources, even ones from the same vendor. And then send it places like RIAs, SOAs, and in this case, into portals via mashlets.

It was the 30th anniversary of Oracle and in case you missed the first 3 decades, it's an impressive growth story that ends with a whopping 300,000 customers. So it shouldn't be a surprise that OpenWorld is a monstrous show (the pictures don't really do it justice). More importantly, OpenWorld is also one of those events that can quickly remind you of how important software is to the daily workings of businesses of every kind. Take a peek at their product list and you'll see Oracle has products that store data, report on data, share data, move data, integrate data, transform data, and more. And at least 30 of these are from recent acquisitions.

Interestingly, it's that broad and ever-growing range of products that can be problematic to even dedicated Oracle customers. I spoke with all sorts of organizations both public and private: government agencies, system integrators, data processors, pharmaceutical companies, and even a bread maker. Every one had Oracle somewhere in their organization and most of them had it in many places. And I heard the same issue time and again, even in organizations dedicated 100% to Oracle: 'data from here, data over there, data to here, data to there, and no solution except formal integration or migration efforts'.

Sure, Oracle has its award-winning Fusion Middleware SOA-driven tools to integrate these sources. And Oracle already has a roadmap that ultimately merges/migrates its acquired customers into the Oracle fold. But what does an organization do while its waiting for the Fusion-driven SOA effort to reach critical mass before users can get the answers they need? Just wait? And should we tell this same organization to wait for the ERP migration to be completed before it tries to launch new information-driven initiatives? Of course not. As the kissin' cousin of databases and applications and the next door neighbor of SOAs and portals, mashups are the nimble-and-quick complement to these larger efforts. Mash and publish, growth and innovation continues.

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Today, JackBe announced the latest edition of our enterprise mashup platform, Presto. The release included many enhancements but two stood head and shoulders above the rest: Presto Connect, a JavaScript API that allows Rich Internet Application (RIA) toolsets to incorporate mashups into their apps, and the Presto Portal Integration Guide, a cookbook for incorporating mashups into WSRP-compliant portals (check out the short video of Presto mashups in a portal on JackBe TV or download the Portal Integration Guide with our Presto Trial Download). Like recent conversations about mashups and their value to SOA efforts, mashups bring speed to RIA development and a dynamic user-driven element to enterprise portals.

And this got me to thinking. Why do we mash? Mashups make Portals, RIAs and SOAs better but they are…dare I say it?...just software. They are not ends unto themselves, but tools we bring to bear on business issues and opportunities. What’s the business proposition of a mashup? Not coincidentally, JackBe asked a similar question in our Enterprise Mashup Industry Survey: ‘Could you briefly describe the business problem Enterprise Mashups will address for you?’. While we’re saving the complete survey results for a post-Thanksgiving treat, here’s a sneak peek at a few of the more interesting replies to the question:

[Yes, the last one is my favorite too.]

You must admit that even these few responses represent quite a range of business values. But I think these answers reinforce the basic proposition of a mashup: the IT folks establish a secure, governed framework for mashing and then hand the mashup remote control to the business folks who address their dynamic information needs in a self-service way. In short: we mash because it makes our business stronger. Or, as our friend Dion Hinchcliffe so aptly put it recently, ‘Mashups support growth and innovation.’

So, do you mash? If so, why?

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One of the ‘special pleasures’ of CEOs everywhere is money. How to make sure your company makes enough of it, how to make sure you company doesn't spend too much of it, and so on. So it is with a very deep personal satisfaction that I can report that JackBe has received $9.5 million in funding for sales, marketing and, most important for all of you, continued development of our enterprise mashup software platform, Presto. It is this kind of milestone event that can make even the most grizzled software veteran reflect on the changes that a rapidly-growing industry like ours has already undergone and where it is heading.

It’s easy to forget that less than 2 years ago you couldn’t find a reference to ‘mashups’ unless you listened to late night radio. But enterprise mashups today get coverage in the general business press, make the to-do list of CIOs and enterprise architects, and even rank high on analysts lists of technologies to watch and embrace. Notable mashup software/service providers include a literal Who’s Who of heavy-weight companies like IBM, Yahoo, and Microsoft. And we’ve already seen some frighteningly-quick exits from the mashup space, a few notable sudden entries, and the obligatory wannabes who want to ride the mashup coattails while hoping you can’t tell the difference. All this in 2 short years.

Most importantly, the vernacular and the technology of mashups has grown by leaps and bounds. For example, here at JackBe we’ve introduced the first Mashup Markup Language, an XML/XQuery/XPath answer to creating complex mashups, and Mashlets, a mashup visualization that can be published and consumed in a variety of platforms including portals, RIAs, Wikis, blogs and just any old web site. We also introduced the first set of guidelines for mashup buyers and implementors in our 5 Cs of Enterprise Mashups. And like JackBe, we’re seeing other mashup vendors relating their products to broader enterprise IT efforts like ERP/SFA, portals, RIAs, and perhaps most notably, SOAs.

So, here we are. Smarter than we were 2 years ago. More relevant. More motivated. And I genuinely believe that the opportunity ahead of us is huge. We have a great chance of being a technology that forever leaves an enduring mark in the enterprise software ecosystem. But it’s not a done deal. The experts tell us we still face some hurdles. If the last 2 years are any indication of our future trajectory, you’ll need to hold on tight. It should be one heck of a ride.

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I am a Mathematics geek by training (Carnegie-Mellon University, class of 1990) and still have a big fixation with numbers today. And I am proud to say that I've used my skills to turn a mathematical equation into a memory trick, one I've been befuddling my coworkers with for days:


The answer is 'Enterprise Mashups', of course. More accurately, it's a Reader's Digest list of a number of notable events you might want to take note of. In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya, 'Lemme esplain':
I think I've tortured the numbers enough for one day. I hope my mother reads this and finally sees that my math degree wasn't wasted.

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Whew! What a week we just had! JackBe got a mention in a major newspaper, was at 2 conferences, participated in an industry association, and unveiled 3 major new product innovations.

In case you missed the mention in our previous post, JackBe got a small nod in The Wall Street Journal in an article titled Do-It-Yourself Software. At the very same time, we were a big sponsor of AjaxWorld. And that’s where the real interested stuff really began (particularly for you).

JackBe CTO John Crupi and Lead Architect Kishore Subramanian presented the opening session titled "Let My People Mash". John talked about the architectural aspects of enterprise mashups and discussed the C5 Framework for Enterprise Mashups. Kishore went on to do a live demonstration of one of our newest innovations, Presto Wires, browser-based visual mashup designer and composer. Wires is a bit akin to Yahoo Pipes except that it has an enterprise focus and is built on our Presto Edge mashup server.

In the Wires demo, Kishore showed how easy it was to create a mashup that invoked several third-party services, merged and filtered the results, and published the mashup as another service that can be consumed by the users. He then showed how to mashup SalesForce WSDL web services to create a mashup that encapsulates some complex micro-orchestration of multiple SalesForce services (login, query for Sales Leads) and Yahoo Geocode REST service (to obtain geocodes for each Sales lead obtained from SalesForce query). And there wasn’t a single line of code involved.

For both these scenarios, Kishore also demonstrated how easy it is to create a mini-application (we call them Mashlets) that encapsulates the mashup functionality and becomes a entity that can be published and consumed in a variety of platforms like portals, websites, wikis and RIAs. All in all, we think it made for a powerful demonstration of enterprise mashups!

In a separate session, JackBe’s Chief Architect Raj Krishnamurthy and VP of Engineering Deepak Alur presented a talk entitled "The Language of Enterprise Mashups". In this session we revealed the details on yet another innovation from JackBe, our Enterprise Mashup Markup Language (EMML), a declarative XML-based user-oriented mashup language we use in our enterprise mashup server that is exposed via Wires. We think this is the first enterprise mashup language in the industry and it is very focused towards the users needs rather than the IT developers needs.

Wires, Mashlets and the EMML are great examples of the continuous innovation in Enterprise Mashup technology that everyday brings us closer to the goal of empowering the end-user. We will post the recordings of these sessions as soon as they are available. And the Trial Download of Presto will include Wires and Mashlet functionality very soon. (We'll make sure we call those out on this blog when they go live.) In the meantime, you can check out a few pics from the event on our Flickr page. And if you were at the show, saw our stage presentations, or had a chance to stop by our booth, we would love to hear your impressions.

Now most folks would consider this a full week. But we were just getting started! Deepak also participated in the Mashup Summit on the UCSF campus and an Open Ajax Alliance discussion. . But more about those events in our next post…we need a cup of coffee first.

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I am here on the first day of AjaxWorld in Santa Clara, California. The conference just kicked off and JackBe started the day on a great note. This morning we were noted by the The Wall Street Journal in an article titled Do-It-Yourself Software!

Over the past few weeks our team has been busy working on a set of cool new innovations to be included in our Presto product. But I am kicking myself for not have written up some of those innovations prior to their unveiling. So here's a brief outline of those technologies and an invitation to stop by our booth here at AjaxWorld for a more detailed walk-through of some of our new innovations:

We will be writing more about these topics in detail and have more screencasts up soon. Meanwhile, if you are at the conference, check these out!

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It's only Thursday morning, and I've already had a pretty full week. I got to stay at 'The Second Home of Elvis'. I got to eat with Caesar. And I got to hang out with 20+ Gartner analysts. Where was I? I was at GartnerPalooza (my name, not theirs!), three concurrent Gartner Summits in Las Vegas: 'Portals, Content & Collaboration', 'Web Innovations', and 'Open Source'. For those of you who weren't lucky enough to be there and lose money at the blackjack table like me, I thought you might like a summary of at least a few of the mashup-related items from the event.

First and foremost, it a bit exciting to note mashups are now officially at the peak of the Gartner 'Hype Cycle'. This is interesting as mashups were unheard of a mere 18 months ago and have now leap-frogged some notable but apparently slower trends. On a related front, there are also 3 recent Gartner reports that cover the enterprise mashup world: 'Who's Who in Enterprise 'Mashup' Technologies', 'Reference Architecture for Enterprise 'Mashups'', and ''Mashups' and Their Relevance to the Enterprise'. You might want to check them out if you are a Gartner subscriber and, if not, check out the ZapThink note on our website, 'JackBe Platform for Enterprise Mashups'.

I've made note in the recent past that mashups are hand-in-glove with SOA efforts. Interestingly, Ray Valdes seems to agree and goes one step further, describing mashups as a means to fulfill some of the unkept promises of enterprise portals. Mashups, along with a supporting SOA effort, can bring elements of self-fulfillment and simplicity that are lacking in the enterprise portal packages today, he says. While I don't think I do it justice here, Ray weaves mashups, SOA, and portals together in a compelling, synergistic way.

David Gootzit talked about the 'Portal of the Future' and mashups are a key actor in the tale he told. David described portals as an 'important' entry point for enterprise mashups. More interestingly, he outlined key areas that must be addressed for mashups to become to a first-class portal citizen (like user profiles, security, metadata and portlets) and guidelines to deploying mashups.

And there was more mashup talking to be done. Unfortunately, I had to come home to get ready for AjaxWorld. Which means I am missing Anthony Bradley's session on mashups tomorrow, among others. If anyone has comments on that, I'd love to hear them.

Oh, and Elvis says hi. Stop by his place if you get the chance.

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If I wanted to talk collaboration, I could wax poetic about the ways users can collaborate in the world of the enterprise mashup: tagging mashed services by type or usefulness, rating source services for quality, and even leaving wiki-like comments on the finer subtleties of services they've used.

For once, I'm not gonna. Instead, I'm going to make a rare self-serving request. But before I do that, here's your warning: the following could be construed as a shameless marketing plug.

[begin marketing stuff]

As analysts and bloggers alike continue to ponder and pontificate on the value enterprise mashups, what was once buzz is fast becoming reality. To get a collective grasp on 'what is an Enterprise Mashup' from your perspective, we've created a short survey on Enterprise Mashups.

Take a minute and fill out this [very!] short survey and and you'll receive a free copy of the Survey Results Summary. Equally important, you'll be entered in a drawing to win an iPod. The survey results will help users, vendors and analysts alike understand mashups from the perspective of the collective.

Let your voice be heard!

[Now back to our regular programming.]

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About a a year and a half ago JackBe issued a warning, ‘DIY Ajax = DOA Ajax’, that said writing your own Ajax widgets was dangerous to your health and your career. Today, with over a hundred open source and commercial Ajax toolkits and frameworks, we can safely say we were right.

As you might expect, early indications are that developers are writing (or, at least, trying to write) their own enterprise mashups following the same pattern as the do-it-yourself Ajax developers. Now that JackBe has been providing enterprise mashup solutions for the last year, we want to issue a new warning: Don’t Write your own Enterprise Mashups!

In the interest of full disclosure, I should take a moment to remind you JackBe is an Enterprise Mashup company that offers an enterprise mashup platform called Presto. More to the point, Presto has provided us with a nice portfolio of customers that see the value in enterprise mashups. And, more importantly, thought they’d be crazy to write their own enterprise mashup platform. That’s not a boast (or, at least, it’s not intended to be) but just the background from which we issue our warning.

And from this experience, we’ve developed a simple but powerful formula to help classify enterprise mashup functionality. We’ve found that it can help even laymen more effectively understand, plan, execute, and even evaluate an enterprise mashup solution for completeness. We call this the C5 Enterprise Mashup Framework.

C5 is a simple, nicely-organized capabilities checklist which defines the elements necessary to be a complete enterprise mashup platform. If an enterprise mashup software platform satisfies the 5Cs, it will likely save you hundreds if not thousands of man-hours getting your enterprise mashups to execute in a scalable and secure manner.

Because mashups are user driven, the C5 Framework highlights four user actions centered around one core security concept. The four user actions (C’s) are consume, create, customize and collaborate. The fifth “C” is a core security concept we call confidence that encapsulates enterprise security, reliability and governance requirements. The 5Cs fully defined would be:

The fifth “C”, Confidence, is what truly differentiates consumer mashups from enterprise mashups. Confidence is the security and governance infrastructure established by IT that must be followed by the mashup user, even if they are doing their own mashing. (Some might call this 5th C ‘Compliance’). Business users need the same freedom as consumer-type users but must have the confidence that their organization’s trust, security and governance requirements are met.

There you have it, the C5 Enterprise Mashup Framework. A simple, powerful and effective way to checklist software vendors to determine if they in fact provide a complete Enterprise Mashup Platform. It is not a great stretch to say that the 5Cs would be difficult, at best, to create from scratch. Don't do it yourself. Equally important, make sure you have a checklist like the C5 Framework to help separate the players from the wannabes.

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[As a preface to this blog, I think I should take a moment and introduce myself. I am JackBe’s CEO and co-founder. Until today, I have been leaving the blogging to some of JackBe's better known (and more loquacious) team-members. However, as Enterprise Mashups continue to garner more and more attention, I've come to the conclusion that the global Enterprise Mashup conversation might benefit a bit from my perspective on occasion.]

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Harvard professor Andrew McAfee, originator of the term 'Enterprise 2.0', has introduced another wonderful set of ideas in his latest blog entitled The Great Decoupling. Andrew’s blog is a discussion about MIT’s Tom Malone’s book The Future of Work, which deals with information flows and decision rights and how these are impacted in enterprise by technology.

McAfee mentions that (and Malone’s book details) that information can now more freely move about in a company due to the ease of communication and cost-effective nature and availability of broadband internet access and processing power. He then goes on to explain the phenomenon of “lateralization” replacing “centralization” when analyzing information exchanges and uses drawings (like the ones pictured here) to explain the differences.

McAfee makes the point that:

“Malone’s theory, however, goes much farther than just outlining how information flows change. It also predicts how decision right allocations will change as a result. His thesis is a simple and powerful one: decision rights will also become more lateralized as information costs plummet, leading to greater power and autonomy at lower levels within a hierarchy -- in short, greater decentralization.“

Why is this at all interesting to me (and you), you ask? Well, all of this seems to certainly be relevant to the nature and definition of mashups. After all, a mashup is the result of taking disparate and highly available pieces of information and “mashing” them together to create a new piece of information. In essence Malone seems to be describing, among other things, the reason why mashups have arisen and the importance that mashups have in today’s IT environment.

However, McAfee’s knowledge about enterprises and how they work lead him to disagree with the practical nature of some of Malone’s ideas. McAfee makes it a point to highlight how new rules about distribution and access to information as well as the possibility to interact with it will need to be put in place in order for these ideas to be implemented in enterprise.

“Most of what I’ve seen recently strongly indicates that the sudden near-disappearance of information costs is bringing up a fascinating and consequential set of questions for organization designers and corporate leaders. They now have the freedom to place decision rights where they wish without being hampered by information costs. What are the long-term consequences of this great decoupling? Rather than a steady rise in decentralization, I think we’re going to see an extended period of innovation and experimentation. I think Malone might well be right that the "market share [of centralized management] is likely to decrease," but I also think there will be strong movement in the opposite direction -- toward more centralization of some decision rights—and a lot of very interesting hybrid models, some so interesting that they’ll look like science fiction.”

In essence McAfee is making the point that for enterprises, a hybrid model needs to be put in place. One in which information is available as long as proper governance, auditing and tracking can be established. Simply put, without the possibility of governance, no enterprise will formally allow nor motivate such an exchange and hence the decentralization of decision rights cannot occur.

This is very similar to the point that JackBe has been making about the need for enterprise IT infrastructure to evolve so as to be able to establish and enforce the necessary governance and create an environment of trust. JackBe's own John Crupi and Deepak Alur have gone to great lengths (like here and here) to make and illustrate the point that the difference between consumer and enterprise mashups has to do with the fact that consumers can have free access and free rights, but enterprises must have the ability to create and manage their circle of trust.

JackBe's enterprise mashup experiences in dealing with many large enterprises to deploy enterprise mashup solutions makes it clear that the hybrid model that Andrew McAfee describes is required. Furthermore, we believe that all enterprise IT stacks will need to evolve to ensure that these new capabilities can be put in place. Fortunately for us, we saw this coming and have created an Enterprise Mashup Platform that strongly focuses on governance and trust issues, and one that is complementary to existing platforms.

The future is here!

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When it comes to software, these are interesting times for both techies and non-techies alike. Witness Time Magazine's Person of the Year for 2007: "You". This is a savvy reference to users' interaction with "the new Web" or "Web 2.0", with...

"...community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It's not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution."

Wikipedia, YouTube, MySpace. Exciting stuff to be sure. Not to mention Flickr, Google Maps, Twitter, Pandora, Last.FM, digg, del.icio.us and the multitudes of other Web 2.0 sites out there. Hard to argue with the idea that these sites are changing the way we interact with technology and the resulting benefits. But one important aspect of this "revolution" that the Time feature fails to point out is that this transformation is currently restricted almost entirely to the consumer space. The benefits of this "world-changing" experience largely disappear as these same users enter their corporate workplace each day and use their business applications.

In the workplace, instead of sharing these next generation Web experiences, users typically find themselves interacting with different siloed software applications that are often poorly integrated with each other and whose UIs do not enable the sort of interactivity, configurability, and customization they desire.

In this world, it might be more accurate to say that the corporate ERP system or the ubiquitous-but-annoying Portal software is 'person' of the year! This is not to disparage the vendors of these software packages (much), but to highlight the fact that change often comes more slowly to the corporate environment and is limited or throttled by these tools.

By now you know well that our goal at JackBe is to bring the benefits of Web 2.0 to the Enterprise and make "You" (The User) the person of the year inside the workplace. Our approach to bringing the benefits of Web 2.0 to the Enterprise is to create the premier Enterprise Mashup Platform (which we call Presto).

At JackBe we believe that Mashups are user-driven, user-focused and ad-hoc in nature. But as we've discussed in the recent past, what differentiates our approach to Mashups from what you'll encounter in the consumer space is an approach that embraces (yet does not displace) existing Enterprise infrastructure and middleware. And as heterogeneous, disparate data sources are the norm, enterprise mashups must meet the need of bringing these hetergenous sources together elegnatly. Finally, I can attest personally that any good Enterprise Mashup Platform must also be built to deploy securely (with the proper governance and access control policies) and safely (with capabilities for high-availability and real-time monitoring).

Remember, we're no longer not talking eye-candy technology to connect restaurant listings with Google maps. We're building solutions to critical, often sensitive, business needs. Serious features for security and safety are unsexy-but-vital capabilities you've got to have in your Enterprise Mashup platform.

If you are a Enterprise Architect in a Fortune 2000 company, these are capabilities to live by. I'll be discussing topics like enterprise mashup security and reliability in great detail in my next few posts. And that's the kind of stuff that would make YOU into Person of the Year in your company.

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Ok, ok, its an overstatement. But the ROI of SOA is difficult, at best, to define and measure. Have you noticed that the press and blogosphere is filled with SOA implementers/analysts discussing the ROI of SOA and the idea that stand-alone SOA efforts are DOA? For a small snapshot of this teacup tempest, look no further than the recent commentary from SOA expert David Linthicum, the Nucleus Report on SOA ROI, and the subsequent commentary from ZDNet's Joe McKendrick and IT advisors Neil Macehiter and Neil Ward-Dutton.

While these experts differ on issues like the importance of SOA ROI, how to calculate SOA ROI (if at all), and why we don't have more/better of it, they all seem to agree on one thing: 'Enterprise-wide support for SOA hinges on the ability to demonstrate value to the business at large — more growth, revenue opportunities, and all that good stuff.' (Joe's words, not mine.) And that's where your job is at stake. Or, at least, the long-term support of your SOA efforts.

Let's face it, SOA is plumbing. Nice, shiny, efficient plumbing to be sure, but still plumbing. And your average business dude/dudette (think sales manager, marketing director, finance officer, or customer support rep) could care less about it. In fact, if they think about it all, they probably just hope it stays right where it is: out of sight and running quietly. These same business folk probably appreciate the marble floors, wood-paneled doors, and brass fixtures that surround this plumbing much more. In other words, they like that bit of 'stuff' that actually frames the plumbing and brings it to life.

SOAs need to change this inward-focused quality. To paraphrase Macehiter/Ward-Dutton in their recent note, 'More big vs small thinking: SOA vs BPM', IT must focus on where the real business value of SOA lies. That means it needs help. Macehiter/Ward-Dutton point out that BPM can help distill some SOA value up to the business level. And as one of the early implementers of Enterprise Ajax, JackBe knows from extensive first-hand experience that Ajax makes a great service consumer.

To this collection of SOA-complimenting tools I'd add the enterprise mashup. JackBe has found in its enterprise mashup implementations that they can actually drag the SOA out of the proverbial IT basement and onto the end-user's desks. It's not only highly visible, but it's user-driven, giving IT a way fulfill the promise of SOA and enhance that elusive SOA ROI.

As a practical guy I like definitive examples. Luckily, we've already seen a number of very real synergies from the mashup/SOA combination. Just a few of them include:

SOA is still relatively new. Enterprise Mashups are, urguably, even newer. So you are likely just getting your Enterprise Mashup mojo going. But if SOA is on your enterprise to-do list, make sure you get Enterprise Mashups on that plan as well. It may not cost you your job, but it could move your SOA from 'questionable' to 'successful'.

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Parting Comment 1: Kudos to Geek and Poke for distilling this talk of SOA ROI down to a single cartoon.

Parting Comment 2: Coincidentally, JackBe's blog has talked in the recent past about the cost-of-ownership for enterprise mashups. We didn't do a survey or try to define formulas. But our multi-part blog on 'Enterprise Mashups and Total Cost of Ownership' (here's part 1 and part 2) is a good look at some of the business and IT impacts involved in enterprise mashups. (That's a biased opinion, I admit.)

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It’s so predictable. Whenever there’s a hugely popular technology concept, everyone jumps on the bandwagon and ends up confusing the industry. This year’s winner is “Mashups”. Popularized by Google Maps, it’s now all the rage. Even the Wall Street Journal has covered the topic. Unfortunately, most of the mashup talk seems focused on homogeneous data sources that are easily connected to each other. In short, nothing at all like real-world enterprise architectures. As JackBe's own VP of Engineering, Deepak Alur, put it in Mashing the Enterprise Service Cloud, 'once you step inside an enterprise, things can be a lot different for mashups'. He couldn't be more right.

Deepak worked through 2 issues that differentiate enterprise and non-enterprise (or 'consumer') mashups: the disparate nature of enterprise services and the common enterprise requirement for governance. And others have added to this discussion, like SOA-expert David Linthicum, with a useful walkthrough of security strategies for mashups in the enterprise. All of these things must be functionality supported in any mashup software that claims to be 'enterprise-grade'. It feels like we're finally getting a good set of 'founding principles' for mashups in the enterprise. And to this list I'd like to propose another principle: the proper architecture for an enterprise mashup.

Let's start with a common mashup: 2 data sources joined and subsequently visualized in a map widget. Popular map widgets, such as Google Maps and Yahoo Maps, are self-contained and embeddable Ajax components that can display any address, business, point of interest or driving directions. But say you want your sales prospect’s office locations (stored in a Salesforce.com database) displayed on a Google Map. To complicate matters, you also want to retrieve your current customer’s office locations (stored in an internally-managed Siebel database) to show them along side your prospects color coded by industry. You (or more accurately, a developer) must write a significant amount of Javascript code to retrieve the prospects and display on the map. In this particular example all this “mashing” happens in the browser as show below.

Mashing in the browser works well when information can be retrieved and directly display on the map. However, things get tougher when we need to “integrate” data from multiple sources before we display on a map because the more integration we have to do in the browser, the more customized code we need to write. That means that you not only have to write Javascript code to get the data, but now you have to write code to analyze, integrate and finally place the data on the map. In essence you’ve turned the browser into a mini-integration engine. This is not necessarily a great idea for a wide variety of reasons, particularly the processing typically required to perform such integration tasks. There a solution to this problem though; it’s called Enterprise Mashups, and it lives in the server, not the browser.

Enterprise mashups integrate or “mash” mostly on the server, where the real processing power typically resides. Let me illustrate this by expanding on the prior example. Suppose we want to take all our customers (in Siebel) and our prospects (in Salesforce) and detect which ones are competitors with the help of Hoover’s web services. We could do just what we did in the consumer example plus write more code to get a list of competitors from Hoovers for each prospect and customer. In this example, there’s large amounts of data traveling to the browser plus the data integration is supposedly happening in the browser as well. This is a very tall order for a tool that was originally intended to view static HTML. The efficient solution to this need is to “mashup” the data in the server as shown below. This is the core of Enterprise Mashups; they do all the integration work in the server where the processing power is.

Are server-driven mashups required for the enterprise? No. I expect some trivial mashing could be successfully completed in a browser-driven architecture. But even the simple example above becomes almost impossible to achieve once you've factored in the security and reliability requirements common to an enterprise. Or allow for more complex data needs like a filter-intersect-join mashup with 10,000 data elements from half-a-dozen separate data sources.

The road to successful enterprise mashup solutions is similar to most enterprise software. A proper, enterprise-capable architecture is a must.

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In my last blog entry, I defined what I mean by a mashup. In this entry, I want to expand upon how I think mashups differ in the enterprise compared to some of the consumer mashups out there.

I mentioned in my earlier post that mashups based on maps are ubiquitous and something that the users can immediately grasp. But, once you step inside an enterprise, things can be a lot different for mashups. Enterprises are not greatly interested in map-based mashups, neither are they interested in RSS or ATOM services which I think are still not fully leveraged inside an enterprise. Over the past few years, enterprises have invested heavily in SOA and because of that, they are just about getting done with service orienting their enterprise with Web Services (primarily using WSDL). And there are many applications in the enterprise that are still very database oriented. It has become relatively easy for an IT developer to expose services as WSDL based web service. And almost every middleware product out there in the enterprise is capable of exposing services via WSDL or makes it really easy to do so. Hence if you start looking around in an enterprise, what you will find is what I call the Service Cloud.

So what you have in an enterprise is a cloud of services where some are WSDL based, some are REST based, some or XML/HTTP, some are database objects, and so forth. Now, the real challenge is how to mashup these disparate kinds of services, with different service contracts and data formats. Any respectable enterprise platform that offers to mashup services in the enterprise must negotiate these disparate contracts these services expose (e.g. while a WSDL based web service defines a service contract in a WSDL document, a REST based web service has no such contact definition). And not only that, it must be done so that that we can make it easy to access for developers and users alike, and to be able to do that securely and with high-performance and scalability. Some enterprises might regulate the service consumption of even public web services that most of us can freely access on the net (think of the ubiquitous RSS feeds for example). Enterprises might allow consumption of these services, but would like to do so with governance underneath to manage, monitor and secure such activity within the enterprise. This is why we built our enterprise mashup platform at JackBe from the ground up, to address the unique challenges of mashing in the enterprise so that we allow our users to do the following:

My colleague John Crupi wrote about enterprise mashups becoming the new front-tier in the enterprise. I would like comment a bit on what he said in his post. While SOA efforts have been IT driven and IT oriented, even with involvement by the business units, the outcome has been primarily IT and developer focussed. It has neglected an important stakeholder in the enterprise, and that is the User. Therefore, I view the new enterprise mashup layer as a new service layer in the enterprise application architecture that finally begins to leverage SOA from the end user perspective and to make the services layer more user-friendly (and developer-friendly) to build, deploy, share the next-generation enterprise web 2.0 mashup applications.

What do you think?

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'Integration for the user and by the user'. That's often how we describe enterprise mashups. Is this right? Historically, integration has been an IT-driven process involving integrating large systems, wrapping and reusing existing systems, connecting them together. And, as we all know by now, the paradigm for this is SOA.

SOA-style architectures are based on open standards, such as WSDL, RSS and REST. These technologies enable us to use standards to dramatically reduce integrations costs. The good news is that SOA killed the proprietary adapter market and the business unit may reap the rewards. The bad news is IT has a huge legacy integration backlog and can't even come close to implementing SOA for the business unit.

This creates an even bigger problem for the knowledge worker (also known in McKinsey-speak as the 'tacit' worker) who needs an ever-changing set of things integrated in an ever-decreasing amount of time. This might be non-tech integration via 'cut and paste' or more sophisticated 'drag and drop' integration. You can think of this integration as situational or 'user-driven' integration. It's what IT can't (and shouldn't!) deliver.

But contrary to some opinions, tacit workers don't integrate for the hell of it. They integrate because they have no other choice. Today, their standard integration software is Excel. They create information by combining disparate information from databases, email, CRM, ERP, etc and integrate it using Excel and collaborate by email the spreadsheet, time and time again.

Every day I monitor ten RSS news feeds looking for news about my current and potential customers stored in Salesforce.com. I'm paid to gather information about my customers from disparate Web sources to help drive our product strategy. But now I finally have technology which helps me integrate this disparate information into an instant application. Not the full-blown application we're used to, but rather a micro application that does just what I need it to do with the data I consumed. Welcome to Web 2.0. More specifically, welcome to Enterprise Mashups.

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Over the last year, the term mashup has become extremely popular not only in the consumer software space, but also in enterprise software. It has been a little more than a year since I joined JackBe as VP of Engineering responsible for executing our vision. Over this time, I and our team at JackBe has been busy creating our enterprise mashup platform, which is a unique innovative offering in enterprise software today, by combining the benefits of RIA technologies such as Ajax/RIA, Web Services, Service Oriented Architecture and Mashups.

At an internal technology briefing last week, my team and I presented and demonstrated the features of Presto, JackBe’s enterprise mashup family of products, to 25 developers and consultants. One of the important areas of discussion was around what we mean by a mashup and how the term 'mashup' has evolved over the last year to mean almost anything. For example, the following is the definition of the term mashup on Wikipedia:

The problem with this definition from my perspective is that it allows you to practically label anything as a mashup, including a portal application, composite application, and what have you that brings disparate content onto a single web page.

I don’t think I want to disagree with this or any other definition of a mashup floating around in the industry. However, I feel that all the existing definitions and explanations are lacking something so important about the real intent of these mashups. This was also apparent at the discussion a few weeks ago at the IBM Mashup Ecosystem Summit. So, now I feel compelled to offer you what we at JackBe mean by a mashup:
Allow me to elaborate further using the following characteristics:

Before I conclude, I would like to emphasize a few points.
In my next blog entry, I will discuss more about our work in creating our comprehensive enterprise mashup platform that encompasses the above characteristics. It finally feels great to be able to talk about what we have been obsessively building over the past year!

What do you think? I am really interested to hear other opinions and thoughts around this.

(Editorial note: Since I've been asked about this a few times, I've submitted this blog to Digg. You are welcome to add your Digg here.)

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Looking down a microscope at my son’s school, I was amazed that all those ‘things’ could co-exist in such a tight shoulder-to-shoulder world. These organisms even thrive in this type of environment, dying if you separate one of the 'things' from the group. It might be obvious but I’ll say it anyway: SOA is like that. It’s impossible to exist alone, even deadly. But learn to co-exist with your neighbors and you flourish.

I've also seen many posts on similar subjects, such as Eric Norlin's 'Assembling the disparate bits' post. And because JackBe makes both SOA ‘consumer’ products (a mashup consumer interface, Dash, and an Ajax IDE, Studio) and ‘producer’ products (a SOA virtualization and mashup server, Edge), we’ve seen the SOA Preti Dish in action too many times to count. We’ve had the opportunity to interoperate with many, many third-parties in the SOA world. JackBe has both consumed BEA portlets and had applications (can we call them 'applicationlets'?) consumed by a BEA portal. We’ve brought in services third-party ‘service’ types including EJB, SOAP, REST, RSS, and XML, and from many function-specific vendors like Salesforce, Bloomberg, X-Ignite, StrikeIron, Amazon, Yahoo Pipes, Google, ESRI, Ionic, and some really cool demographic data providers that we'd love to mention but can't. We’ve incorporated third-party Ajax widgets from Dojo, ActiveWidgets, DynamicDrive and others. It’s a dizzying list. And every day we add more.

None of these technologies or technologists could live alone. I find it impossible to believe that any single vendor could provide the innovation, engineering and support behind the broad array of SOA infrastructure out there. And this buffet-style development changes many things for the better. Flexibility is the major improvement. And it’s one that is not emphasized enough. Don’t like the service you are using? Need a better 3-dimensional graph? Find another vendor. The cost and risk of change is much smaller than it used to be.

Life under the microscope can be tough. But it’s worth it.

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I am writing this as I fly home from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. It was a good show to get the big picture of all the things under the Enterprise 2.0 umbrella and all the heavyweights were there (IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, ) talking Web 2.0 everything in the Enterprise: wiki, blog, search, mashups, collaboration, and a few other topics as well.

It probably wouldn’t surprise anyone to hear that my favorite session was the ‘Enterprise 2.0 Mash-up’ panel. JackBe wasn’t on the panel (but of course we would have been happy to!) so I got the chance to listen closely to other vendors talk Enterprise Mashups. Here’s a few of the more interesting things I got to hear in the session:

I must admit I am surprised how different JackBe’s data-driven mashups are from the wiki-, RSS- and application-driven ‘mashups’ of other mashup vendors. The lesson, I guess, is a simple one: like ‘Enterprise 2.0’, the phrase ‘Enterprise Mashup’ is broadly used today. Caveat emptor.

There was also an interesting side-conversation about the ‘definition of a widget’ and what it would take to allow vendors to pass widgets around between themselves. This is a topic raised at the recent IBM Mashup Summit and while it ain’t a done deal yet its good to hear the mashup vendors at least talking about it.

And, in spite of the differences in the practice of the mashup vendors, the principles seemed to be all in line: simplicity, quick, and richly interactive. Now that’s something JackBe can agree on.

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Did you notice our blog has a new look? That's because this evening JackBe launched a new edition of its website. Normally, my cynical personality would respond to such an announcement with a ‘great, even more marketing sludge to ignore’. (I’m the guy who runs marketing!) But I expect this time it’s different because our new site isn't just more pleasing to the eye, it's easier to use and has a lot more information.

Most importantly, JackBe has set up an Evaluation Download of Presto, our Enterprise Web 2.0 Mashup Platform. It's an easy way to get started with enterprise mashups, SOA virtualization, and Ajax applications.

And, as we’ve posted in the past, we know it isn’t necessarily easy to wrap your arms around the 'Enterprise Web 2.0' thing. So we’ve added ‘Getting Started’ roadmaps for techies and non-techies.

We’ve also added new ‘See It In Action’ videos, new hands-on demos, new whitepapers, and some new case studies of Enterprise Web 2.0 in the real world. A complete list of