Two years ago analyst Gartner launched its annual European
software jamboree with a big push on
Web 2.0.
According to Gartner,
enterprise application mashups were to rely on a range of
technologies that IT departments could already implement, including
service oriented architectures, which could split off application
functions and allow them to be published to other applications and
presented in a web interface.
Mashups are likely to be familiar to most people, as they have
become commonplace on the consumer-facing internet.
The most popular approach is to combine the application
interface from Google Maps
with other sources of data. In this way, online travel provider
Opodo has created Escapemap, which presents flight search results
on a map. Another example is
weatherbonk.com, which feeds
global weather data onto a Google map.
Although potential is there, businesses have been slower to
develop internal mashups of their applications, according to Niko
Drakos, research director of social software at Gartner.
"There are early adopters, but generally it is not widely used.
There are a lot of governance issue around doing new things with
enterprise applications. This will be better suited to early
adopters of portal technology, but other organisations have more
fundamental problems to deal with," he says.
The early adopters are taking advantage of this side of Web 2.0,
which promises "loosely coupled" applications. These can allow
developers to build new applications, for new processes or job
roles, by combining data from internal sales figures, customer
relationship management systems and data from external sources for
example.
The most often quoted source of external data is geographical
data from Google, which it uses for its mapping service.
Ed Parsons, geo-spatial technologist with Google, says firms
already accustomed to using software as a service, such as
salesforce.com, were now understanding the advantage of application
mashups. "We are beginning to see salesforce.com customers doing
it, by combining mapping data from Google with their sales
applications."
Companies can benefit from this approach because they can see
geographic patterns in customer behaviour and better target their
marketing or customers relationship spending, Parsons says.
There has been some interest from more mainstream business
application suppliers, such as SAP and Oracle, he says.
"The potential is there but you need to get the whole value
chain geo-spatially coded. Often they are not particularly well
coded in these databases," he says.
Brendan Tutt, portal and social media network business leader
for IBM, says IT departments are beginning to see the mashup model
as a way of relieving pressure on their work-load.
Tutt has found that organisations that were already exposing
business data as a web service were finding that it was easy to
build new application rapidly by combining different sources of
business data in a mashup. With mashups, IT departments were better
able to see where the business drivers for new applications lay, he
says.
"When somebody publishes a mashup, it goes back up on to the
catalogue and other users can rate it, another feature of Web
2.0.
"If IT departments start to see a strong demand for a particular
mashup, then they can develop it into a well governed application
portal in the mainstream production environment."
While businesses struggle with the "programmable" web,
businesses are finding it easier to benefit from the other side of
Web 2.0, that of social networking, collaboration and peer
review.
Gartner's Drakos says a lot of businesses are now taking
advantage of Web 2.0, mostly those that have a strong online
presence enhanced by blogs, wikis and feedback from user-generated
content.
"The same kind of technologies are beginning to make their way
more slowly for use internally though intranets and browser-based
applications," Drakos says.
So far this approach has had the most impact in media and
entertainment industries where firms can get feedback on a new
product or service and can check the market reaction before they
launch it.
The social aspect of Web 2.0 can help organisations with their
internal processes by allowing employees to record their own
experiences on blogs and wikis. "Some are unreliable, some are
half-baked or just wrong however, because [there are so many
contributors] you are building a knowledge repository that becomes
more structured as time goes by. That becomes a valuable business
asset that can be used by project teams and to train new
starters."
Businesses can also help define new processes by seeing what
their employees are focusing on in blogs and wikis. Well defined
processes can be managed from the top down, but new unfamiliar
processes benefit from engagement in social networking, Drakos
says.
This is where the two sides of Web 2.0, the social networking
aspect, and the programmable internet side, begin to come
together.
IBM's Tutt says more people are coming into the workplace who
are used to social networking environments such as Facebook, which
allow them to add applications.
They can bring internet information together with RSS feeds and
services such as iGoogle, and they expect to be able to do the same
in their business IT environment, he says.
These "super-users" can help other employees benefit from Web
2.0 and improve overall acceptance of these technologies.