Enterprise mashups: A blend of risk and reward

The mashup is an almost irresistible idea. Take two or more external apps, data sources, or services, blend them together, and voila, you’ve got an entirely new, eminently useful creation. The classic mashup takes something like Google Maps, combines it with a public data source (say, a listing of ATMs), and spits out a Web 2.0-style clickable, annotated map.

That species of mashup primarily serves consumers. The enterprise has been slower to get on board. Lately, though, big business has started to get the religion. According to Real-World SOA blogger Dave Linthicum, “Mashups are the new uber-technology for the enterprise. The enterprises just don’t know it yet.”

Even those IT managers who recognize their business value are nervous about the security risks that mashups pose. To ease their fears, Linthicum has written “Mashup security,” a three-step guide to risk-free lightweight integration. “The mashup revolution is analogous to the Web revolution in the 90s,” Linthicum says. “Everyone was running scared at first, but now we can’t live without the Web. Same thing with mashups. In a few years, we won’t want to live without them.”

Joining that short list of things we can’t live without: open source, which continues to take the enterprise by storm. With a projected throng of 11,000 attendees set to swarm into my hometown of San Francisco this week for LinuxWorld Conference & Expo, the broad-based appeal of open source is now beyond doubt. InfoWorld will be following the show’s comings and goings this week, and our Open Sources bloggers will be weighing in as well.

Senior Contributing Editor Neil McAllister offers his own analysis of the open source phenomenon, examining its impact — past, present, and future — on the software industry in “Open source upheaval.” Perhaps open source’s most radical effect, according to Neil, has been to alter the relationship between vendors and customers, putting more control in the customers’ hands and lending more flexibility over how they use their software. That dynamic has forced proprietary software vendors to change their pricing, distribution, and support tactics. Even so, says Neil, who used to write the Open Enterprise column for InfoWorld, “We’re probably not going to see a ‘nuclear cataclysm’ in the software industry anytime soon.”

Although traditional software will continue to have a role for the foreseeable future, open source is here to stay. In recognition of that fact, InfoWorld is launching a new awards program, the Bossies (Best of Open Source Software). Those same InfoWorld Test Center folks who bring you the Technology of the Year Awards every January have been banging on open source products and projects for the last month in search of the ones that exemplify “innovation, functionality, ease of use and implementation, and a proven track record in serving the needs of businesses.” We’ll be announcing the winners on September 10, 2007, so stay tuned.

By the way, I’ll be on vacation next week and will be leaving this column in the capable hands (and word processor) of Executive Editor Eric Knorr. See you all on August 27.