Enterprise mashup

One emerging phenomenon is the “enterprise mashup.” Their easy integration of content and services promise a whole new class of enterprise applications, and more importantly, the ability to innovate and remain competitive across the globe. FST recently sat down with Stefan Andreasen, founder and CEO of Kapow Technologies, an integration software vendor that enables companies to create enterprise mashups that can enable the increasingly Internet-based and self-service driven financial industry. He lends us his experience of deploying mashups, portals and content integration projects at more than a dozen financial services companies.

FST. First of all, what exactly is an enterprise mashup?
SA. A mashup is a service or application on the web that uses content from more than one source to create a completely new service. They are easy to create, and involve purely web-based assets that can be deployed faster and cheaper than traditional enterprise applications and integration technologies such as EAI. While mashups will never replace “heavyweight back-end” IT assets in the enterprise, there is a world of opportunity for companies to create new possibilities for internal and customer-facing services made from all the broadly-available information on the Internet and Intranet.

FST. What technologies and commercial products that are used to create enterprise mashups?
SA. The greater availability of simple and lightweight APIs have made mashups far easier to create than any traditional integration technique used earlier. Enterprise mashups use resources on the web, and are executed on the web. The core web technologies required are those a company already has, including HTTP, AJAX, REST, RSS and so on. Meanwhile there are commercially available suites that enable fast development (StrikeIron, Zimbra) and integration (Kapow Technologies).

FST. Why would a financial services company create a mashup?
SA. The main reason is to foster innovation and adapt to forthcoming market needs. Mashups empower user-driven innovation among individuals, workgroups, and departments. Most likely, there are already many mashups in existence among IT workers, business analysts and service representatives. Much the way blogs revolutionized online publishing, mashups are revolutionizing web development by allowing anyone to combine external content and services from sources like Amazon.com, eBay, Google, Windows Live and Yahoo! in powerful ways. Meanwhile, financial services companies have many internal systems that can be leveraged into mashups. Looking into the future, as more mashup development tools become commercially availably, there will be more possibilities than we could ever imagine. This is why enterprise mashups have garnered the attention of major analyst groups such as Gartner and Forrester, and is why we are reading about them in mainstream business publications such as the Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek.

FST. What basic types of enterprise mashups are possible today?
SA. There is a discussion among industry experts such as Dion Hinchcliffe (http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=59) and Jason Bloomberg (http://www.zapthink.com/report.html?id=ZAPFLASH-2006320), as to how many kinds of mashups there are. But for the sake of simplicity, I propose that there are three:

• Presentation level mashups – the ability to extract and assemble various parts of applications and web sites and other assets available via HTTP to create internal portals, wikis, and customer-facing sites. For example, one of our banking clients was able to create a portal for high-net-worth brokerage clients. In about six weeks’ time, this major financial institution was able to integrate information from seven different internal enterprise systems to provide a seamless, secure single web page that gave customers everything they needed to know. Without enterprise mashup technology, this project would have cost millions of dollars more, not to mention the extra time required by consultants and IT workers.
• Logic based mashups - combining browsable logic with REST and SOAP services into a new logic component, like a REST service. A good example is Momondo (www.momondo.com), which aggregates the airfares of low-cost carriers into a single web site that is easier for customers to use than hopping around to each site individually.
• Data/Content based mashups -Taking content from two or more sources of which some or all are web based and wither combine them into a new data repository or transfer the data to a new place or application.

FST. What types of mashups should companies create first?
SA. Inside every financial institution I have worked with, there are literally dozens of “lightweight,” projects that can be deployed quickly to streamline operations and internal processes. For example, think about extending publicly available web site information to employees’ cell phones, and mashing up corporate data with other web resources to create self-service portals. Once companies start realizing the power and cost-effectiveness of these types of lightweight and adaptable solutions, an explosion occurs and the innovation curve explodes upward.

FST. With regards to mashups, what should financial services executives be concerned about?
SA. There are two issues that executives need to think about. Strategically, I believe the number one issue is that companies need to learn how to effectively leverage technology in order to be innovative and agile in a highly competitive world. Most likely, this includes decentralizing IT to a certain extent, and allowing knowledge workers more freedom to create solutions like mashups to solve their departmental problems. The second issue is about governance and security. Managing internal data sources effectively means ensuring confidential information is not inadvertently shared. This requires solid governance in the form of policies, access management and data security. Because we are still the nascent stages with mashups, it’s critical that financial services firms monitor the development of them to make sure that the content being used is within corporate standards. Meanwhile this monitoring will also help financial services firm understand what kinds of innovations are being created, and share them broadly across the enterprise depending on their value.

Stefan Andreasen has been deploying mashups for major financial institutions before they were cool. With more than 100 successful projects under his belt, he is the founder and CEO of Kapow Technologies, and one of Silicon Valley’s foremost IT integration thought leaders.