What are the business implications of mashups?
Like most of the web technologies that emerged, Mashups are going to open a new phase in Business Processes Management (BPM). The traditional software development within a Business is proving inflexible, hard to change and not responsive to the business. With the wide capabilities of Mashups, Web2.0, there will emerge new possibilities for Businesses which are inexpensive, flexible, highly scalable integration models.
Instead of providing a customised, single form of service, Businesses will open robust web services that can easily integrate with internal web services as well as external web services that are part of wide mashup ecosystem. This will generate new business value as their clients will have endless possibility of utilising their service and merging with other services harmonising each others business values.
To capitalise "first mover" advantage, various businesses are already producing different API's that can leverage their market position. This will lead to a necessary trend where each business will have to come up with a similar service in order to prove their position in the market. According to mashupfeed.com, the average new mashups per day is 2.76!, as of 8th June 2006.
"Dion Hinchcliffe thinks that 80% of enterprise applications could be provided by external services, which is a great equalizer for smaller businesses that don't have huge IT budgets, and could almost completely disconnect the issue of business agility from the size of your development team." (Source :[1])
Opportunties include:
* Timely access to information and context * Improved decision making * Enchanced communication * Better collaboration
Sources:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=2484
http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/column2/archives/2006/01/mashups_and_the.php