Make Mine A Mashup Please

Peter Rip of Crosslink Capital recently posted an entry on his EarlyStageVC blog entitled "Web 2.0 - Over and Out". While his comments have kicked up quite a bit of dust in Web 2.0 circles (mostly with aspiring vendors in the space), many of his points are reasonable. More specifically, his points with regard to the next wave of innovation and websites being islands of isolation are spot on. But Peter's post deals mainly with the consumer side of the Web 2.0 story. While the challenges to innovate and monetize efforts serving consumers is significant, I believe the most difficult challenges await those helping Web 2.0 succeed within the enterprise.

While the Web 2.0 moniker is manifesting itself in a numnber of different ways within the enterprise, the chatter I hear most from customers has to do with user empowerment via enterprise mashups. It seems every day a new vendor emerges with a mashup or composite application framework that promises to allow users to reuse their organization's programmed assets and mash them together to create new applications. It's a good story and believe me, noboby would like to this vision realized more than me.

Unfortunately, despite all these vendors' best efforts, the use of enterprise mashup tools is still heavily bifurcated with nary an end user in sight. On one hand, the tool is being used by power users to create glorified reports or basic mashups that contain very little function specific logic - simlar to that of portals. On the other hand, you've got IT support personnel and some programmers who've been lured in by the mirage of point and click graphical programming. While it may impress some, most developers are left shaking their heads asking; "why learn a new tool to do the same things I can do in the programming language I already know?"

The bottom line is users have a difficult time understanding complex data types, conditional logic, order of operations, arrays, enums, etc. Vendors can up with all kinds of disarming terms to mask these programming constructs but in the end, they're just that...programming constructs. And unfortunately, in order for the end user community to build a mashup or composite application of any significance, they will need to master these concepts.

So how do we empower the user via Web 2.0 services? We believe a valuable interim step is to provide tooling that allows users to integrate programmed assets into the applications they already use, not create new ones. By integrating into existing applications using a technology such as Ratchet-X, the task at hand becomes very tangbile. They don't have to think in terms of data grids or sets, rather, they think in terms they already know such as invoices, customers, etc. At this stage of the game, most users are looking to link their systems together to get more comprehensive views of the business challenges they face. They don't need new applications and they sure as heck don't want to build them. Rather, they want to link their existing applications to the other applications, sites, services, databases and forms that make up the full story. In other words, they want to make the application they already use, their system of record if you will, the mashup.