The Mashup Ecosystem

StrikeIron recently participated in IBM's Mashup Ecosystem Summit event in San Francisco. The idea was to bring together the leading thinkers in the Mashup space to discuss what collective steps could be taken to help pave the way for increased customer benefit and adoption, especially in the areas of interoperability, and of course with the enterprise in mind.

Attendees other than IBM included StrikeIron, Coghead, Reuters, Accuweather, JackBe, Kapow, Mashery, SocialText, SnapLogic, and Programmable Web.

One of the challenges that surfaced at the summit is the term "mashup" itself. It sounds rough and inexact; characteristics not usually associated with enterprise IT priorities. Enterprise IT folks typically will cringe at the term, so coming up with a new one would be a good start.

While some folks point to subtle semantic differences between terms for this class of application for categorization, as I mention in this article, http://www.sdtimes.com/article/special-20070415-01.html, for the most part mashups, situational applications, composite applications, and to some extent RIAs (nothing that says an RIA can't be browser-driven) all have the same general purpose - to create more value by combining together information assets in creative ways and with new interfaces.

Some of the notes my colleagues shared (along with my own thoughts) on the challenges the mashup world faces include:

• Availability of services, the industry needs more -- services represent the building blocks.
• Need a definition for the essential ingredients for a successful mashup.
• What kind of analytics need to be in place to demonstrate success, ROI?
• How does the industry create widgets/gadgets that don't create new integration/interoperability problems?
• How do we overcome inconsistencies across multiple service implementations? (hint hint)
• Is the browser a constrained environment, and how can we best move beyond?
• What about the vast seas of copyrighted data that exist all over the Web, what issues might arise if utilized in ways other than intended.
• Who will decide the answers to all of these?
• How are enterprise users security concerns addressed?

The good news is that identifying the issues gets us half way to the answers, and the summit was a great step forward for the industry.  I look forward to answering and addressing these issues as mashups become more integral to the enterprise.