Half-Baked or Mashed: Is Mixing Enterprise IT And The Internet A Recipe For Disaster?

POWER TO THE PEOPLE
While most apps on AppExchange are created by SaaS providers and vendors, other sites explicitly target end users as developers. Salesforce competitor LongJump, for example, is working on a hosted platform, still in closed beta, aimed at empowering nondevelopers to build applications. Like Microsoft's Popfly, LongJump isn't aimed just at intranets: Apps hosted on its platform can be shared publicly or offered for sale. Serena Software has gone further than most SaaS vendors, aiming to compete with Coghead, IBM, and Kapow. Its Vail service is intended to fully integrate with an enterprise's own SOA or other Web services, connecting to them through secure links. Serena also offers a freely downloadable mashup development environment aimed at end users.

Using outsourced software to integrate internally hosted servers may seem unnecessary, but Serena argues that hosted services eventually will replace most internal servers. Whether or not you buy that, SOA and mashups definitely make it easier to mix hosted services with internal apps, so outsourcing the mashup server itself will make sense for some organizations.

Mashups can also be created without any server or service at all--although their roots on the Internet mean that most mashups are Web-based, there's no reason they have to be. For example, OpenSpan offers a mashup tool that runs locally on Windows PCs, meaning it can interface directly with native Windows applications. Instead of converting files to RSS feeds, it monitors how applications interact with Windows APIs and can also intercept them, giving it complete control of an application's user interface, I/O, and use of shared system resources.

GET READY
Before opening the door to mashup technologies, you need to make several important decisions, over and above the question of who'll develop applications.

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Photo by Sacha Lecca