Why enterprise mashups aren’t as prominent as the hype

I still think “cloud computing” will win the coveted Snidley Buzzword of the Year award, but after checking out the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, it looks like “enterprise mashup” is running a close second.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s an important trend here. But as John Musser, the founder of ProgrammableWeb.com put it in a well-received presentation at the Expo Wednesday, “Beware the hype, but don’t ignore.”

[ Learn more about AJAX and other rich Web app dev tools often used in mashups in our Test Center guide. ]

What is a mashup? In essence, it combines multiple Web services into something new, addresses a specific need, and can be developed quickly by an individual or small team. It may also have a rich user experience, but that, says Musser, is optional. On the enterprise side, a mashup is developed internally, often uses internal and external Web services, and is done at the data and logic layers (and sometimes at the presentation layer as well).

There’s no way to get an exact count of how many mashups, consumer or enterprise, are floating around the Web, but as they say on Wall Street, Musser’s site gives you good directional guidance. Programmableweb.com has collected nearly 3,000 mashups to date, but only 30 are enterprise-oriented. That compares with 1,615 mapping mashups (the most popular, by far) 442 photo, 393 shopping and 351 search mashups. There are plenty more, but you get the idea.

Why IT isn’t so fast to follow the mashup trend

Why so few on the enterprise side? According to Musser, there are four good reasons: First and foremost it’s an immature marketplace, and we’re still in the early adopter phase.

Less obviously, but very important, is the lack of SLAs (service level agreements) for the APIs that are out there. “There’s no way IT will use an API that doesn’t come with a decent SLA,” Musser says. Interestingly, two major SLAs were announced recently; Google Maps Premier, which starts at a hefty $10,000 a year, and Amazon Web Services, which offers silver and gold support for $100 and $400 per month respectively.

Third — no surprise here — is the question of security, including data access rights, lack of identity standards, and compliance regulations. Sure, that’s a major problem on the public Web as well, but IT is going to insist on solutions before it throws its hat into that ring.

And finally, there’s the issue of data quality. If you put together a mashup pulling data from multiple sources, which is, after all, the point of a mashup, how do you know the data is clean and up to date?

It’s worth noting that mashups share the characteristics of a number of familiar IT tools, including composite applications, portals and dashboards (now called presentation layer mashups), EAI (enterprise application integration) and ETL (extract, transform, load).

Important mashup technologies include REST, Atom, JSON, Ajax, Flash, JavaScript and XML, while traditional IT is more reliant on SOAP, Java and .Net.

A survey of enterprise mashups

Underscoring his point that this is a very young market, Musser said he was able to come up with a few examples of enterprise mashups at large businesses — but he had to look hard to find them. Here are a few he mentioned:

• GreatLakes Enterprise Loan Services teamed up with DocuSign to build an electronic signing mashup for its Web site. According to the DocuSign Web site, “Documents are now delivered for electronic signature immediately upon application, signing is verified, and completed documents are retrieved and digitally archived — all without human intervention.”
• Société Générale, the French investment bank, uses a deal-tracking mashup combining elements from AltaVista, Google, and Yahoo.
• Kapow Technologies reduced the IT backlog for automaker Audi by building a mashup that extracts corporate data from 20 Web sites instead of gathering the data by end, a time-consuming and expensive proposition.

The enterprise mashup Kool-Aid

Despite these examples, you have to ask: Is Musser pushing Kool-Aid? After all, his site is advertising-supported, and he needs eyeballs. I don’t think so. Indeed, he started his presentation by dissing Gartner’s overly bullish take on mashups. Dig below the hype and there are indeed interesting technologies and business opportunities to explore.

I welcome your tips, comments and suggestions. Reach me at bill_snyder@infoworld.com.