Blogs, wikis, widgets and RSS have become some of the prominent features associated with Web 2.0, however mashups may yet become the Web 2.0 technology that will have the maximum impact on future software development efforts.

Consumer mashups became popular a while ago, with www.housingmaps.com being one of the earliest examples of easily and successfully merging real estate data with live map locations, to provide users a convenient way to locate apartments. More recently, the huge number of mashups created with Google Maps highlights how effectively data, code and content that is already available can be mashed-up, reused and integrated easily - even by newbie web users.

However, the enterprise mashup space hasn’t been keeping up with its consumer counterpart although many knowledge workers in the enterprise can benefit enormously from the ability to easily create and use mashups on the fly – and thereby reduce the long tail of IT demand.

Some of the reasons for the lack of adoption in enterprises are the security, compliance and integration requirements of enterprises, when combining and using data from various sources and systems. A lack of standards and formats has also been another issue that has prevented large-scale enterprise mashup use.

Vendors in the enterprise mashup tools/ platform space are however changing the dynamics of this market. In the last quarter alone, there have been several new and better 2.0 product versions of existing mashup offerings from Dreamface, JackBe, IBM, Kapow Technologies and others. Standards support for mashups have also emerged very recently.

If the current challenges involving the creation and use of mashups in the enterprise are resolved, mashups could very well turn out to be a brand new model of software development soon!


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