StrikeIron Mashups are "Red Hot"

Note from the President: StrikeIron and Mashups are "Red Hot"

Mashups have received a considerable amount of airplay throughout the entire year, but the movement now seems to be picking up more steam than ever. We recently had our second mashup contest of the year hosted with IBM and saw some really innovative entries, including the winner from Apatar which integrated our Global SMS Web service with their own technology utilizing IBM's QEDWiki mashup platform to create a valuable Salesforce.com customer mobile communication solution.

Several other mashup contests have been announced by other companies, and there are all sorts of new mashup offerings rolling off the production lines such as Tibco's new enterprise opensource AJAX platform, Microsoft's Popfly, Google's Mashup Editor, Yahoo Pipes, and countless others.

So why are these mashups increasing in popularity and why the momentum now? Additionally, why are they gaining more and more traction within the enterprise?

A primary reason is an increasing understanding of the benefits that mashups can provide. Leveraging data from both inside and outside of the enterprise in new creative ways by a larger group of people within an organization (including knowledge workers, not just I.T.) enables time, resources, and technology to be leveraged in any way that they can - ideal of course for the bottom line.

Knowledge workers are recognizing that they can now participate in answering their own needs by building customized views into organizational data enhanced with external data and external functionality without having to wait in the IT queue (which in some organizations can be over a year). This provides a supercharged creative movement internally that allows business users to participate in providing their own short-term solutions, many of which can become prototypes for useful and more complete applications for the I.T. organization to distribute enterprise-wide. This in turn eases the I.T. burden, provides significant visibility into which data in the organization is deemed most useful by those within it, and also provides a greater deal of control for the I.T. organization as security at the API level is often easier than at the UI level.

Another equally important driver is the increased access to larger and more diverse sets of data, both internally and externally. Internally, more and more organizations are standing up APIs (with the proper governance of governance of course, sometimes within an SOA and sometimes not) creating a more fertile ground for mashups to occur. In addition, companies like ourselves are making more and more data sources available with less friction and greater accessibility and diversity of data than ever before. These factors and others are helping to form the perfect storm of mashups that is beginning to organize and will become stronger and stronger as time goes on.