What is a Mashup?
A platform that enables end users to create, deploy, and share Web applications or Web widgets by combining multiple data sources with little or no coding.
These days Mashups are becoming as easy to create as posting a blog and are gaining traction among consumers who are beginning to create, not just use, their own mashups. New tools and services like Pageflakes, Netvibes iGoogle, Yahoo! Pipes, and Microsoft Popfly are empowering nontechnical users to create and share their own mashups.
These easy-to-use offerings go well beyond basic mashups, offering users a powerful engine for creating their own mashups. Integrating information from many systems is a long-standing enterprise problem, and, as a result, mashups enter a crowded landscape of existing legacy software investments. So what makes a mashup unique?
How do Mashups differ from existing enterprise software?
User-generated. The biggest single difference between mashups and traditional enterprise software is that the person creating them is not necessarily in the IT department. Traditional apps are typically rigid, leaving little room for user customization, or, in the case of formal EAI projects, require major IT oversight. Mashup platforms, by contrast, are designed to empower business users to create their own dashboards, applications, and reporting tools, with little or no IT oversight.
Easy to use. With the major exception of business analysts, few line-of-business (LOB) employees have the technical know-how to provision their own portal pages, build their own reports, or integrate data sources. At best, Microsoft Excel is the only major application that nearly all LOB employees can make use of for looking at data from a range of applications and sources. For example, an employee can export regional sales target data from apps like Siebel, then import data from a custom sales incentive system to determine estimate payouts for sales reps. While this solution does not scale well, it is easy and accessible. Like Excel, mashup platforms don’t require a deep technical skill set, relying instead on simple visualization tools for the heavy computation.
Both ad hoc and formalized. For most businesses, there is a sharp dividing line between the ad hoc tossing of data into Microsoft Excel and the more formal design, implementation, and use of traditional enterprise systems — such as customer relationship management (CRM) and business intelligence (BI). Mashup platforms are beginning to smoothly handle both ad hoc and formal applications, adding life-cycle management, security, and scalability to simple mashups and allowing users to implement them in more permanent business processes with little risk. A simple mashup for order reconciliation, for example, that slowly gains features and users over time can be maintained like a formal, business-critical application.
Web centric. Due to their heritage as a Web 2.0 innovation, mashup platforms take a Webcentric design approach, which has several key advantages over traditional enterprise software. First, mashup platforms typically have no preference for internal or external data, allowing users to seamlessly combine CRM data with external data, this Web centricity makes sharing mashups between users easy and convenient. And finally, content is updated in real time, unlike an application like Excel, which requires manual data input and is often simply a repository for static, outdated data.
What are the different types of Mashups?
Presentation layer mashup. The presentation layer mashup, or mashup on the glass, is the most basic form of mashup. Here, data and content are simply presented alongside other, unrelated data in a unified view. iGoogle and MyYahoo! are examples of presentation layer mashups, and within the enterprise they most closely resemble basic portals, with a panel for each distinct data source.
Data mashup. A level of magnitude more complex than a presentation layer mashup, the data mashup allows users to combine, manipulate, and tie together disparate data sources to present a unified view.
Process mashup. The most complex of the three, process mashups allow users to mashup not just data sources but also business processes themselves, customizing process design and invoking business logic across multiple applications. Here, mashups begin to look much like business process management engines.
How should the maketers put a strategy to work on the mashups?
It appears that mashups are certainly cool, but they are notreally on the top. The growth has been steady, but not really explosive. This begs the question: why?
There are several reasons, the primary one being that most current mashups are created for fun and not for business. Enthusiasts with some spare time on their hands are building these during their evenings and weekends, without having monetization in mind. The second reason is that APIs, as with any software libraries, have a learning curve. Certainly Internet companies are trying to expose their services in the simplest possible way, but not everything can be made simple.
Is this what mashups will be - a playground for enthusiasts? I believe that the answer is 'yes'. Even though services like Yahoo! Pipes, Teqlo and Dapper are working to simplify the process of creating mashups, it will likely remain a fairly technical exercise done by enthusiasts.
However, it is also likely that we will see companies and products taking ideas from many mashups and creating applications with the combined functionality. For example, taking ideas from the best mashups (like Cloudalicious) and creating a set of tools for bloggers and marketers would be very useful. So mashups will, I think, become the labs of the web - where rapid prototyping is done by enthusiasts, which gives rise to more integrated offerings by web companies.
A platform that enables end users to create, deploy, and share Web applications or Web widgets by combining multiple data sources with little or no coding.
These days Mashups are becoming as easy to create as posting a blog and are gaining traction among consumers who are beginning to create, not just use, their own mashups. New tools and services like Pageflakes, Netvibes iGoogle, Yahoo! Pipes, and Microsoft Popfly are empowering nontechnical users to create and share their own mashups.
These easy-to-use offerings go well beyond basic mashups, offering users a powerful engine for creating their own mashups. Integrating information from many systems is a long-standing enterprise problem, and, as a result, mashups enter a crowded landscape of existing legacy software investments. So what makes a mashup unique?
How do Mashups differ from existing enterprise software?
User-generated. The biggest single difference between mashups and traditional enterprise software is that the person creating them is not necessarily in the IT department. Traditional apps are typically rigid, leaving little room for user customization, or, in the case of formal EAI projects, require major IT oversight. Mashup platforms, by contrast, are designed to empower business users to create their own dashboards, applications, and reporting tools, with little or no IT oversight.
Easy to use. With the major exception of business analysts, few line-of-business (LOB) employees have the technical know-how to provision their own portal pages, build their own reports, or integrate data sources. At best, Microsoft Excel is the only major application that nearly all LOB employees can make use of for looking at data from a range of applications and sources. For example, an employee can export regional sales target data from apps like Siebel, then import data from a custom sales incentive system to determine estimate payouts for sales reps. While this solution does not scale well, it is easy and accessible. Like Excel, mashup platforms don’t require a deep technical skill set, relying instead on simple visualization tools for the heavy computation.
Both ad hoc and formalized. For most businesses, there is a sharp dividing line between the ad hoc tossing of data into Microsoft Excel and the more formal design, implementation, and use of traditional enterprise systems — such as customer relationship management (CRM) and business intelligence (BI). Mashup platforms are beginning to smoothly handle both ad hoc and formal applications, adding life-cycle management, security, and scalability to simple mashups and allowing users to implement them in more permanent business processes with little risk. A simple mashup for order reconciliation, for example, that slowly gains features and users over time can be maintained like a formal, business-critical application.
Web centric. Due to their heritage as a Web 2.0 innovation, mashup platforms take a Webcentric design approach, which has several key advantages over traditional enterprise software. First, mashup platforms typically have no preference for internal or external data, allowing users to seamlessly combine CRM data with external data, this Web centricity makes sharing mashups between users easy and convenient. And finally, content is updated in real time, unlike an application like Excel, which requires manual data input and is often simply a repository for static, outdated data.
What are the different types of Mashups?
Presentation layer mashup. The presentation layer mashup, or mashup on the glass, is the most basic form of mashup. Here, data and content are simply presented alongside other, unrelated data in a unified view. iGoogle and MyYahoo! are examples of presentation layer mashups, and within the enterprise they most closely resemble basic portals, with a panel for each distinct data source.
Data mashup. A level of magnitude more complex than a presentation layer mashup, the data mashup allows users to combine, manipulate, and tie together disparate data sources to present a unified view.
Process mashup. The most complex of the three, process mashups allow users to mashup not just data sources but also business processes themselves, customizing process design and invoking business logic across multiple applications. Here, mashups begin to look much like business process management engines.
How should the maketers put a strategy to work on the mashups?
It appears that mashups are certainly cool, but they are notreally on the top. The growth has been steady, but not really explosive. This begs the question: why?
There are several reasons, the primary one being that most current mashups are created for fun and not for business. Enthusiasts with some spare time on their hands are building these during their evenings and weekends, without having monetization in mind. The second reason is that APIs, as with any software libraries, have a learning curve. Certainly Internet companies are trying to expose their services in the simplest possible way, but not everything can be made simple.
Is this what mashups will be - a playground for enthusiasts? I believe that the answer is 'yes'. Even though services like Yahoo! Pipes, Teqlo and Dapper are working to simplify the process of creating mashups, it will likely remain a fairly technical exercise done by enthusiasts.
However, it is also likely that we will see companies and products taking ideas from many mashups and creating applications with the combined functionality. For example, taking ideas from the best mashups (like Cloudalicious) and creating a set of tools for bloggers and marketers would be very useful. So mashups will, I think, become the labs of the web - where rapid prototyping is done by enthusiasts, which gives rise to more integrated offerings by web companies.
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