Enterprise IT warming up to mashups

If you’re new to the whole mashup scene, now is still a good time to get a feel for the impressive capabilities of application conglomerations which, for the end-user, is akin to mashing up various content to match specific needs.

From a technical standpoint, which is what enterprise IT folks want to know most, mashups are applications built from multiple pieces of data or other applications.

While the very concept of “mashing up content” isn’t new (think desktop clutter), today’s mashups are all about the web, driven by such technologies as web APIs, RSS content, wikis and social networking environments.

The most entrepreneuring IT coders might feel comfortable jumping into mashup management modules using PHP coupled with AJAX but for those who prefer large solutions from well established vendors, some of the most popular enterprise-level mashup platforms include IBM’s QEDWiki, Microsoft’s Popfly and Xignite’s Splice.

Why should enterprise IT managers take notice of mashups?

For one thing, Gartner expects around 30% of businesses to use mashups this year and the growth, according to most industry observers, should be strong for many years to come.

Furthermore, whatever provides an edge to a company should be investigated. Mashups empower the end-users like never before but also enables developers to help customize the work interfaces, in a highly collaborative manner, thus making it easier to reach higher levels of productivity and general workflow efficiency.

Everybody in an typical business is likely to highly benefit from mashups. Consider today’s popular applications using the power of mashups: CRM, billing, operations, accounting, partner systems, ERP, ECM and other proprietary data repositories that benefit from being mashed up for finely defined tasks.

While the typical application is about information delivery, it would be fair to think of mashups as self-service platforms.

It might also be anticipated that companies that focus on innovation, which may include making good use of mashups, are the most likely to save time and money, make better business decisions and reduce missed opportunity costs.

Tags: mashups, business decisions, knowledge workers, innovation, content, api, rss