Enterprise Mashups

From CW, "Enterprise mashups meet SOA"

If ya been reading our blog you'll remember that we blogged about these ideas before - the mashup, the api, in the enterprise. If your new, check out the CW piece.

Take two services, add a connector, and call the right customer in the morning.

The line is blurring between the enterprise and the Web. Mashups live on that porous perimeter, offering the reusability of an SOA plus very rapid development using prebuilt services outside the firewall. Soon, we may live in a world where it's difficult to tell where the enterprise stops and the Web begins. It's scary -- and exciting at the same time.

Combining, creating, and cohabiting

Google Maps mashups, which hook the wildly popular mapping service to some database that includes street addresses, have become almost cliché. Yet this type of solution is actually a perfect demonstration of the value of the mashup notion: Somebody has a need, takes a few days to create the mashup solution, and there you have it. (See Google Maps.)

More complex mashups approach composite applications (those that are made up of many services), an advanced SOA concept. For instance, you could mashup a customer database with marketing metrics, then mash up the results even further with sales forecast processes.