[Web 2.0 Expo SanFrancisco] Enterprise Mashups: Hype vs Reality
Presented by John Musser (Founder of Programmable Web and a great guy to talk with.)
John provided a well rounded presentation on enterprise mashups. Cleverly debunking the myths and focusing on the data and realities of enterprise mashups. He also gives an analysis of mashup tools and expected enterprise mashup future trends.
The Hype:
ZapThink’s 2008 SOA Forecast:
“The world of enterprise mashups will come into its own in 2008, and become what many people
are calling the “killer use-case” for SOA.”
The Surveys:
Source: Information Week, September 2007
I like this public access pie chart where it shows 43% of IT web applications are either developing or have deployed applications using data from publicly accessible web sites. I wonder if that meant both web pages and web services? With the trending towards RESTful APIs returning payloads that are XHTML and ATOM based, does making the difference between web pages and web services matter any longer?
What is a mashup?
I think these points are excellent in that our vision for ROA, which used to be SOA for the UW, hits upon our goal of serendipity and quick creation of innovative web applications. This is in contrast to our past designs where we focused mainly on long-living applications.
Here are some points that make looking at mashups different than the way we currently or used to see things.
For the UW this would be “uses a Resource Oriented Architecture (ROA)”
What makes mashups different?
Adapted from ProgrammableWeb.com Web2.0 Expo slides
What I like best about this matrix is that it gets to the heart of the same decisions and tradeoffs we made here at the UW; both to our webservices and application development strategy.
Web 2.0 is definitely coming into the enterprise and here is a list of those things:
The Long Tail of IT - a really good slide on how mashups address the long tail of IT which is characterized as:
I like this pie chart from Information Week, Sept 2007 which asks the question about how folks feel about non-IT staff developing their own mashups. Which for the record I believe is the right thing for the UW to do! Of course making sure we work through all the important challenges while we advance to that end state.
I like the comparison that Microsoft Excel is currently still the mashup tool of choice. While this new Web 2.0 era is more about web based accessibility of mashups as well as real time access to that information.
John also makes another comparison of mashups that makes sense. Enterprise mashups are focused on implementations that target a specific business problem. Making solutions much more agile vs our current monolithic systems which were created to meet global central processing. Now those systems are expected to solve targeted and quick business problems which it can’t. This of course results in business opportunity loss and frustration directed at many IT shops.
Web Oriented Architecture
John presents a new acronym, WOA, which he describes as Web Oriented Architecture however his description fits almost perfectly with Resource Oriented Architecture. Especially with the comment that WOA is a unified means to identify resources online.ROA is what we currently subscribe to here at the UW.
See slide #29 for data related to the percentage of open APIs by type. RESTful APIs rise to the top with 68% seen in the wild by ProgrammableWeb.
How will you build your mashup? Fundamental commonality: HTTP, REST, XML, RSS, Atom, Ajax, XHTML
List of mashup tools presented:
Top 4 enterprise mashup challenges:
1. Immature Marketplace - early adopter phase with lots of change
2. SLAs for APIs - lack of SLA as a barrier to adoption
3. Security - data access rights; lack of identity standards; compliance regulations
4. Data quality and trust - applies to both internal and external data
Mashup Advice for IT
1. Beware the hype, but don’t ignore
More opportunity than risk here, and it’s going to happen anyway…
2. Got SOA? Make it a mashup platform
Mashup-enable IT infrastructure: use open standards, expose services
3. Start simply
Small apps, pilots, evaluations
4. Think tools, both for IT and business
Tools to enable wider adoption, speed creation, enforce policy
5. Add governance as needed
Mashup-aware policies for security and external services
Trends to watch:
SLAs beginning to appear:
Impact assessment of Mashups in The Enterprise
eTech key take aways:
Tags: mashup, soa, web 2.0 expo, web services