Scenario 1: Mashup Mania

Culture Mash-up adoption follows the usual curve. Enthusiasts first, then early adopters, then fast followers, and finally, after it's been happening so long its old news, slow adopters. Mash-ups, like Ajax, are a disruptive technology, meaning that they are a genuine threat to the old way of doing things. The old way here being traditional EAI and composite application technology from SOAs. In mash-up mania scenario, this may very well mean that slow adopters are the never adopters, because they're cancelled, put to pasture, given special projects, or what-have-you. Fast-moving folks with good mash-up tools and a vast landscape of services can punch out 10 smaller applications that not only do what your old creaky ways of building software did, but are in turn reusable and composable.

The tenets of Web 2.0 can be exhibited in a variety of ways that range across a spectrum with social aspects at one end to primarily technical ones at the other (figure below). Web 2.0 software for the enterprise can effectively demonstrate aspects across part of this range, most of it, or just a snippet of it. But the generally, the idea of mash-up mania scenario is that Web 2.0 software is online, open, made of pieces, encourages constructive social interaction, and is driven slightly more by its users and data than specific features. Wikis are a great example of this latter concept; their biggest two features are the edit and save buttons, with the data and people gathering there being far more important."

Copyright Intellectual property issues continue to be problematic, especially ones involving people's personal information. The right to remix content is worth to be respected and learning the ins and out of the Creative Commons license will be standard fare for most of mash-up creators in the mash-up future. It is expected that public bursts over violations of fair use will arise and make mash-ups less straightforward for certain types of applications.

Mash-ups in the Enterprise

In mash-up mania scenario, there are two central themes to mash-ups and Web 2.0 -- user/community collaboration and rapid application development and integration. Both face challenges from Enterprise IT, but both are inevitably part of the Enterprise Software stack.

Big Enterprise 2.0 In many ways the penetration of “Mash-up-like” technologies are easy. A large part of Enterprise IT’s budget is spent on application integration. The challenge for Mash-up techniques will be the balance between ease of use and sophistication. Arguably Microsoft Office enables desktop mash-ups today – access multiple information sources with Excel and Access and render new dynamic reports in Word. But this isn’t easy enough for most users, robust enough for mission critical IT, nor secure enough to place in the cloud for universal access. Yet the latent demand for a ‘long tail’ of user applications remains. Mash-up technologies are the response to empowering end users to create Web 2.0 solutions.

The big influence of Web 2.0 on Enterprise apps don’t look like a Flickr, Mappr, Taggr, or Tiggr behind a firewall. They don’t look like a wiki, digg, or a space. Collaboration is a feature, not a purpose. Many, if not all, Enterprise applications include tagging, collaborative markup, etc. But collaboration becomes a feature of business process applications the way printing is feature of desktop applications.

Many Enterprise applications in the Enterprise are not in the Enterprise at all. Users collaborate in the cloud, not in the desk. Think “expense tracking and reporting”, “personnel reviews”, “sales force collaboration,” and all the other micro processes that plague every enterprise, big and small. By definition, as we work on the road, from home, or on our Blackberries, we remain part of these long running processes that reach outside the firewall.

Standardization & API A real universal registry for mash-up APIs gets figured out. Sites likes Programmable Web do an amazing job making it easy to find the API you're looking for. But this is a far cry from the formalism of UDDI, the Web services directory standard. This means sorting through APIs is done manually and is not tool aided. In this scenario this situation doesn't last long. Very new releases, upgrades to UDDI 3.0 includes the trick. We've only seen Ajax applications and reusable APIs proliferate like this for about a year. It’s expected in this scenario to see APIs and services sprout up like wildflowers inside and outside the firewall and it will be so very tempting to use them.

Security (The cross-domain security problem) A real issue with many mash-ups is that they want to combine the data from Web services from over the Web. Ironically, at this point in time, the browser security sandbox really discourages this. In reality, many mash-ups do the mash-up part on the server because of this restriction. Using the Web as a world-wide SOA isn't going to happen until this problem is solved. The sandbox can be worked around with quite a bit of effort today but there needs to be a one-size fits all browser solution. In mash-up mania scenario, big players in browser industry work together (Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, etc.).