Weblogsky: Enterprise Mashup

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Enterprise Mashup

Everybody's doing it: now IBM's buzzing about "Web 2.0 in the Enterprise," with Rod Smith, IBM's vice president of emerging Internet technologies, saying

Customers I talk to are abuzz about Web 2.0 and the creation of popular Internet services that seem to quickly appear out of nowhere, becoming instant global phenomena that are enjoyed by the masses, including their employees. They want to apply that new paradigm to make their businesses act faster and grab new opportunities. There's no going back.

An account of Smith's speech at the New York PHP conference goes on to say that he "unveiled a new Mashup prototype based on Web 2.0 technologies that applies to industry and business situations." It's called, simply, "Enterprise Mashup." Say what? It "blends external information and Web services (e.g., news feeds, weather reports, maps, traffic conditions and more) with enterprise content and services, instantly "mashing" them together to create a fast, flexible and affordable application for specific business needs. Mashup, derived from the hip-hop practice of mixing song samples, are a website or applications that combine content from more than one source into an integrated user application using open technologies like Ajax, PHP and syndicated feeds (RSS or ATOM)."

New business model: hip-hop for the Enterprise!

In financial services, the Enterprise Mashup can provide a unique Web "radar" that enable users to create a dashboard based on the interests of friends, relatives or coworkers from their computer's address book. For example, a stockbroker can drop a list of client names into the wiki-based Mashup maker and get dashboard view of their interest areas with links to topical blogs, wikis and relevant news feeds from all over the Web. The dashboard shows which client interests overlap with other contacts in your address book. With this view, you can easily get up to speed on areas most relevant to your client's portfolios, read current news stories and find new resources on investment tips you can share. The view also shows how your contacts relate to one another in areas of interests (or investing), so you, or your clients, can make new business connections and expand your corporate network.

Smith credited early pioneers for their innovations in social networking technologies for driving this new capability, and suggested, "there is pent up demand for a new category of applications that until now have been unaffordable for businesses to build. We feel the Enterprise Mashup project begins to address this demand and will help evolve the way business collaboration is conducted in the future."

jon posted this at 7:33 AM
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