Mashups - anyone doing anything interesting?
By Phil Verghis on April 1, 2008As part of a white paper I’m writing, I have been doing some research on ‘mashups’. (Web applications that combine data from multiple sources in one user interface.)
The idea behind mashups is simple. As anyone in IT can tell you, there are far more demands for their services than there is time available to get to them. No wonder people find corporate IT not moving fast enough for their needs, particularly if their needs are simple and highly situational. Enter mashups. The idea is that you can create simple ‘widgets’ where you combine content and services from within the corporation and out on the web to create new, simple applications. This can be created by the end user, not IT.
Two interesting mashup makers are available from IBM and Microsoft, called QEDwiki and PopFly respectively. If you don’t know what mashups are, check out the IBM video on YouTube, and the 30 second overview from Microsoft. Will give you a good idea of what is possible…
Are you using mashups to help your customers? Let me know how!
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I just started a blog about Enterprise Mashup’s at http://www.mashup.nl (sorry in Dutch) because I want to share my knowledge about Enterprise Mashup Technologie and want to learn from others.
I’m also curious about success stories in this area of interest. I know that Jackbe (http://blogs.jackbe.com) has started to share their experience. In their latest newsletter they stated about these examples:
- Client Prospecting: Mashup your sales prospects with external news, stock and company information. Feeding your sales representatives with current information about their prospects is critical. You likely subscribe to a variety of services - such as Dun & Bradstreet corporate ratings and Bloomberg news -and you also often use Google for news and financial information. Imagine a mashup that combined all of prospect data with contact information and engagement history from your CRM system.
- Customer Service: Mashup your call center application with package tracking. Give your call center reps immediate access to order status and package tracking, both in the same view, instead of forcing them to toggle between different interfaces. Mash up your order management system with logistics information from UPS or FedEx. This would lower call times and raise customer satisfaction at the same time. You can even add Google Maps to visualize order status.
- Research Information: Mashup relevant medical, scientific and law research with your own internal data. Whether your business deals with research in the medical, scientific, financial or law fields, connecting the research data that’s in the outside world to your own internal work is crucial. Mashing research provides users with quick access to a comparison of time sensitive information, providing better access to relevant research and allowing for better internal research decisions and discoveries.
- Dashboards for Decision Making: Mashup your product specifications, revenue planning, and product information with other products in the market. Whether your product information exists in Excel spreadsheets or an ERP system, you can easily mashup that data with external competitive information for better tracking of results, more accurate competitive information, and an increased time to market for your product. You can share these results with other users and have ad-hoc access.
See also http://www.jackbe.com/customers/success_stories.php
I have also bookmarks with samples of sucessfull use of Enterprise Mashup’s like this one :
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB118584045835882843-5DBxhxe7CQbtDwh9wkUkaziURoA_20070829.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top
Corizon (http://www.corizon.com) has succesfully mashup 7 applications into 1 user interface used by BT’s support agents See http://www.corizon.com/pdf/BTResolveCaseStudy.pdf
I’m looking forward to other contributions
Regards, Niek
Niek,
Thanks for the note and the links. It certainly seems like mashups are in the early ‘cool but why would i want to use that’ mode, much like PCs, mobile phones and the Internet itself in the early days.
Will be very interesting to see how this develops over the next few years.
Peace,
Phil
Hi, Phil.
You should check out the Salesforce platform http://www.salesforce.com/platform It allows developers to mashup data both within and outside of Salesforce itself. Salesforce apps can work with other online app platforms that have APIs, such as the Dun & Bradstreet API mentioned above. Also, check out the Programmable Web blog which tracks mashups. A lot of them are in social networking/consumer space, but this is a great proving ground for enterprise apps, and many of them are listed as well. http://programmableweb.com/tag/enterprise
~Nick
Hi Nick,
Thanks for the pointers. I will check out the Salesforce link. I have seen the Programmable web blog, but had not seen the ‘enterprise’ section - appreciate the link!
Peace,
Phil
Hi Phil,
For over 25 years Serena Software has been a leader and an innovator in the software change management industry. Serena recently released a free Business Mashup Composer allowing users to create Mashups using Web Services and SOA and are offering pre-built Mashups as well through the implementation of a Mashup Exchange.
Check out http://www.serena.com/mashups/ for more detail and a heap of customer testimonials as well (in the Customer Buzz section)
Regards,
Tony
Hi Tony,
Thanks for reaching out. Looks like you have some happy customers!
Peace,
Phil
Hi Phil,
I saw a very interesting mashup tool at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco. This tool - LiquidApps - was just making its debut and looks like an excellent one. I have my team investigating it now. Every one of my team members are enthusiastic about what this tool could mean for us. They are creating great applications and they are just getting started. We found videos and tutorials along with the free download at:
http://www.liquidappsworld.com