In the music world, a "mashup" is the new sound created when a DJ actively mixes pieces of different songs of different styles and beats together. Now it is the latest buzzword at Web services conferences as firms awaken to the potential for mashing up data and applications.
"It's about taking the pieces and building something greater than the sum of the parts," says Michael Ogrinz, principal architect in the global markets division at Bank of America and author of the upcoming book Mashup Patterns, due out later this year.
Sushil Prabhu, CEO of startup technology consultancy OpenCrowd, sees mashups playing a key role in the evolution of service-oriented architecture (SOA). Firms have been componentizing their applications with the intention of reusing those pieces of software, but they haven't necessarily seen the potential for pulling together information from tens or even hundreds of data sources to interact in a single presentation user interface (UI), says Prabhu. "Since 2000, until now, people have been building their SOA infrastructure but they haven't seen much come out of it because there was no front end. This is the front end of SOA-we are now connecting the dots," he says.
Mashup technology can greatly reduce software development cycles, says Miko Matsumura, deputy CTO at German technology vendor Software AG. "If you have to build a new application from scratch, it will take 18 months. If you can mash together existing applications and data sources, you can get to market much quicker," he says. Partnering with mashup creation vendors, Software AG provides SOA integration tools that enable mashups, as well as registry and governance tools, to manage policies.
Creating new structured derivatives products involves the composition of existing components into something new. Deploying an existing derivatives product in a new market, while taking into account local laws and regulations, requires combining different sets of information. "All differentiated services tend to be variations on a theme," says Matsumura, who likened mashups to sexual reproduction for software applications at a recent Web Services on Wall Street conference. The faster that firms can bring these things together, the faster they can deliver new securities that will drive new revenue their way, he says.
MASHUPS AID RESEARCH
Research and analysis are the best potential areas for the use of mashups, according to Ogrinz. Some MBA-qualified research analysts can spend up to seven or eight hours daily trawling Web sites and trying to gauge trends in the industries they cover. That it is easier to identify trends and patterns when looking at information in context rather than in isolation is a no brainer. Mashups provide a relatively cheap and easy way to do this.
A research analyst covering the airline industry, for example, needs to gauge whether or not the industry as a whole is having a good quarter, says Ogrinz. "They could benefit from a mashup application that automatically books flights via different travel Web sites from New York to London, or San Francisco to Boston, several times a day. The application would run all the way through the booking process until the point where it would buy the tickets in order to gauge seat availability," he says.
If the time series reveals that flights on the whole are fully booked, the assumption would be that the airline industry is having a good quarter, whereas if they are empty the analyst would have advance information that passenger numbers are down. Cross-reference this intelligence with a site that tracks the price of airplane fuel over time and it becomes even more compelling. "This sort of mashup would help the analyst gain an advantage over the competition using information that is freely available over the Internet," Ogrinz says.
As long as a public application programming interface (API) has been made available, it is possible to leverage technology contained in Web applications for an entirely new use. Web applications such as Google Maps could be mashed up with an internal customer database to provide a geographical view of where a firm's customers are, for example. And those pieces need not have been built with reuse in mind. "With mashups I can go to various Web sites and the person that created that content has no idea that I was going to somehow leverage it to build something else," he says.
Enterprise data and applications also have to be made available in a reusable format, but in a Web services-enabled enterprise, much of this leg work has already been done.
The challenge with adoption so far is that neither the technologists nor the business users themselves have really understood the value proposition, according to Ogrinz. Part of Ogrinz's job is to promote new technologies that will benefit the bank and he says mashups are the biggest leap forward he has seen for a long time. "I'm naturally very cynical, and this is one of the few technologies to come along in recent years that I could really get excited about and see a lot of potential benefit from," he says.
For all the benefits however, firms need to be careful how much they rely on content and applications taken from the Internet. "The potential for it breaking is greater than a traditional application. You can't use a mashup to reconcile trades or integrate trading systems-it's too brittle," says Ogrinz. Internet mashups rely on someone else's content and API not changing. "It's never going to be rock-solid like lines of code," Ogrinz says. For this reason, research and analysis will likely remain the most popular area of use, because if a link fails, no real harm is done, he adds.
THE ENTERPRISE APPROACH
Who should create mashups is another question. Should firms give business users the power to create their own applications, as vendors suggest? Or should firms take a more controlled approach? Technology consultancy OpenCrowd is currently helping five financial services firms build rich Internet applications (RIAs) to aggregate data and functions from numerous applications and databases for integration and presentation in the user's browser.
RIAs should not be confused with portal technology, which also presents disparate information in the same UI, because RIAs permit those different sets of information to interact, says Sandy Kaul, head of strategy services at OpenCrowd. "This differs from portals where there may be information from multiple applications presented on the same UI, but each portlet on the page would only show information from one underlying application or data source," says Kaul.
"Data and functions can be pulled together from the underlying applications directly on a customized basis for one set of users, or if the combined set of data and functionality is going to be used by many different types of users, it can be codified into a widget that can be shared across the enterprise," Kaul says.
Today, banks are building these RIAs as one-off customized tools used by early adopters, says Kaul, but as firms establish APIs for more and more applications and databases, they will automatically build up a repository of widgets that can easily be reused in the future. "Over time, the number of custom builds will diminish and these custom builds will be broken down into their constituent parts to create a broad set of bank-approved widgets," says Kaul. Because it is still in the early phases of adoption, few financial services firms are willing to discuss their implementations of mashup technology.
Integrating content from multiple systems used to be very costly and time-consuming. With mashup technology, firms can increase the return on their previous investments while developing new, powerful, intelligent software at a fraction of the cost, says OpenCrowd's Prabhu. "If we were going to build something like this in 1999 when the Internet first came about, the same project would have taken us nine to 10 months. It would have cost $5 million to $10 million and that's being very conservative. This costs less than $1 million-and is a lot more powerful," he says.
POWER TO THE USER
While mashups offer firms a great deal of flexibility and increased return on investment, they bring with them potential headaches. Vendors of mashup creation software are very gung-ho about empowering business users to take software development into their own hands, something financial services firms are wary of.
A constant migraine for firms has been that they cannot control what happens in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, says Ogrinz. "Business knowledge gets stuck on somebody's personal drive or gets passed around over e-mail. Changes get made and it's very hard to track them," he says. With mashups, it is equally important that sensitive information does not fall into the wrong hands, whether intentionally or by accident. Just like with blogs and wikis, in a regulated environment like the financial services industry, firms must be very careful about what information they make available to whom.
Vishwanath Venugopalan, enterprise software analyst for technology research firm The 451 Group, says that mashups could actually reduce the amount of niche application development happening inside large firms-the sort of thing that happens under the radar of IT, while it is busy maintaining the broader IT environment.
In big organizations, IT can't serve everyone at the same time. So in order to serve an immediate business need, people who are not technologists by profession but are technology hobbyists-Venugopalan calls them "guerilla developers"-will often build niche applications for themselves and their teams using clever macros in Excel, for example. "These work to a certain degree, but it's difficult to scale them so that they can be used by people outside of a restricted group. The guerilla developers end up running to IT anyway, which just adds to the IT workload and forms a vicious circle," he says.
Ogrinz says that creating mashups is still too technical for the average business user. "Currently, mashup creation tools do require a certain amount of understanding of development, but this will change," he says. "We are getting close to the point where someone who is smart enough to write custom, very complicated Excel spreadsheets can probably start building mashups-especially for simple Web and RSS-based mashups," he says. "Power Excel users are going to be the sorts of people who start to leverage this technology outside of IT," he adds.
Venugopalan says firms will benefit from permissioning their technology-savvy staff to build enterprise mashups using licensed tools. "The goal is to remove all the niche development and deliver more flexibility to the business units," he says. A lot of mashup vendors now incorporate governance and security features in their toolkits, so if a firm is diligent about managing entitlements and only allows permissioned users to build mashups, it should be possible to make sure that information does not fall into the wrong hands, Venugopalan says. "Financial services firms are very sophisticated about managing entitlements so this is nothing new for them," says Prabhu.
Mashup creation software vendors, on the other hand, are hoping for a certain amount of backdoor adoption, Venugopalan says. Many have made, or plan to make, their mashup tools available through a Web browser, making it easier to bypass firms' firewalls, and vendors are making their tools easier to use, in a bid to put IT firmly in the hands of the business user, he says. "A little development knowledge is still required, but vendors are coming out with simpler and simpler versions, which remove the need to understand developing language," he adds.
Venugopalan authored a report for The 451 Group on enterprise mashups entitled Power to the People, which warns that ignoring this technology will not make it go away. The newer generation of workers is significantly more tech-savvy than the last, and if IT departments try and suppress the creation of mashups, people will find undocumented ways of using consumer Web technologies anyway, according to the report.
If someone is intent on creating a mashup, there is little a firm can do to stop them, agrees Ogrinz. Firewalls may prevent people from downloading software from the Internet, but many tools are now available on demand through a Web browser. "The only way to stop people using them in this case is to block these sites-the same way firms block pornography or gambling sites," Ogrinz says. And even then, if employees are really determined, they could create a mashup at home and bring it into the firm on a flash drive or send it to themselves via e-mail, he says.
The 451 Group report predicts that midsize and large enterprises will maintain or increase their activities around enterprise mashups within the next 12 months.