Okay, much to be said and written about enterprise mashups in the year ahead. For my part I am a fan, but acknowledge some big challenges ahead for vendors in this space. First and foremost, when you get beyond the “skype meets SFdC” and “Google Maps meets Houselisting.com” there are precious few examples of what mashups would look like. To some degree the problem here is created by the consumer space where process integration is nil and data integration is lightweight at best. I would speculate that enterprise mashups are probably going to look very little like their consumer cousins. This is not a bad thing, but an essential observation in order to re-calibrate thinking and expectations.

Next up is what mashups ideologically represent, on the consumer side much more likely to be loosely coupled application services with specific outputs and very light interaction, while on the enterprise side mashups will be loosely coupled workflows. The difference is meaningful because workflows imply a chain of events coming together with a specific purpose as opposed to a specific output (e.g. customer support resolution as opposed to an interactive map with your data loaded in it.)

Right now I’m thinking there are two categories, broad, of mashups that are really interesting, the first being analytics in nature and the second being smart collaboration apps that are mashups of traditional transaction or KM systems with Office 2.0 services. Of course there are others, but these in particular capture my imagination and provide some reasonable path to monetization.

Anyway, good article in InfoWorld about the subject.

Enterprise mashups | InfoWorld | Analysis | 2006-07-28 | By Galen Gruman:

But mashups are more than just annotated maps for consumer Web sites. The technology holds real promise for the enterprise, both within companies and among customers and partners. Because mashups use technology that you already have — JavaScript, XML, and DHTML, plus fast Internet connections to support graphical and functional richness — there’s no huge investment required.

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