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In the rush to deliver innovative products and services, companies are eyeballing enterprise IT resources more closely than ever. Many organizations are convinced that amid the cavernous databases, spreadsheets and vast reserves of employee e-mails and documents lies an untapped mother lode of ingredients for new products and services if they’re combined in an innovative way. Small wonder, then, that more organizations are betting on enterprise mashups as a promising avenue to innovation gold. The really hot topic for IT, though, is mashup governance.

Until now, mashups have been a phenomenon of the wild and wooly Web. Combining databases and applications from external sources to create a valuable new service has become the hot new thing. Consider the innovative zillow.com Web site. It combines satellite imagery plus county real estate assessor residential property information, plus sales data from other sources, to produce a compelling real estate valuation service complete with a picture of each house.

Mashup popularity has grown to the point where ProgrammableWeb.com was created to become a clearinghouse of information on mashups. It counts an average of three new public Web sites daily.

However, while admiring them for their novelty, critics have “dissed” the mix of APIs and data as piffle, little more than attention-grabbing joyrides with no long-term value. After all, they point out, how many pushpin data-overlay applications are needed?

New tools
Executive suites everywhere are betting they need more. Following on the heels of other service models, mashup development tools are emerging to bridge the divide among applications, creating new enterprise-class applications from Web-based apps and those that are stand-alone, front-end or back-end — and everything in between.

Intel built a content-management platform for employees using the Java-based Kapow Mashup Server. Danish travel service Momondo.com grabs an edge by using Kapow to aggregate airfares from hundreds of Web sites.

IBM Enterprise Mashup blends Web services, such as news feeds, weather reports, maps and traffic conditions, with a company’s content and services. The result? The logistics manager for a home-improvement store chain, for example, can "drag and drop" weather reports and maps with internal inventory data to produce an application that pinpoints which Northeast stores will be hit by an impending snowstorm and can then check inventory of rock salt, shovels and snowblowers.

But for IT, the real mashup movement is the decentralization of application development, points out Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst, with ZapThink in Baltimore, Md. "That's going to be the revolution, if there is one," Schmelzer says. IT's role may evolve into that of a provider of capabilities, while the lines of business create the applications they want.

A hotter topic, Schmelzer says, is so-called mashup governance. "Just because something can be mashed up doesn't mean it should be," he says. Enterprises need to take care not to mix, say, customer-facing information in a portal with public data. "The big question to ask is, 'What are the unintended consequences of a particular mashup'? That's a corporate policy issue." 

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