What is the future of mash-ups ?

Enthusiasts first, then early adopters, then fast followers, and finally, after it's been happening so long it's old news, slow adopters. Probably not like that this time. Mashups, 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. 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 mashup 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.

Regarding the impact of enterprise mash-ups to the role of a typical business user

Enterprise mashup, requires a special kind of business user: a knowledge worker who is adept at leveraging the power of SOBAs to meet ever-changing business needs. Indeed, while some knowledge workers have the technical capabilities necessary to construct today's mashups, the true promise of SOBAs depends upon user interfaces sophisticated enough for a broader business audience to use. Fortunately, enterprises already have knowledge workers at this level: people who are proficient with Microsoft Excel. Not only does Excel make a powerful SOBA consumer in its own right, but the technical skill people need to get value out of an application like Excel is the level SOBA tools vendors should target when building SOBA interface applications. Few such tools exist today, but the writing is on the wall: the enterprise mashup is the future of the SOBA consumer.

We do think that, enterprise mash-ups will enable the business users getting the direct control over the business processes and business rules that govern how enterprise applications behave. With the domination of business users having analytical and conceptual thinking skills, accompanied by easy to assemble, tailor, change and maintain enterprise mash-ups, traditional function of IT departments will spread throughout the organization.