What's in store for Enterprise Mashups in 2010?

Enterprise Mashups are the big topic for 2010 as organizations seek to harness their SOA investments and get their apps on the cloud. A report by Business Insights suggests the Enterprise Mashups software market was worth around $161m in 2008, and is forecast to grow to $1.74bn by 2013. So what can we expect from Enterprise Mashup platforms in 2010?

In 2009, Enterprise Mashup platforms designed for business started to make inroads into corporate IT thinking by providing a coherent way of bringing together web services, RSS, twitters, maps and other sources of data together in secure enterprise portals. they're quickly becoming the preferred consumption layer of information served from business applications in the form of web services and now there are more than enough case stories to show how scalable and robust the technology is. 'Enterprise mashups = software that's ideal for consuming web services. Great. So what's next?' you ask.

Here I've summarized my top 6 list of the key innovations in Enterprise Mashup platforms you can expect to hit the market in 2010. These are the capabilities that are likely to separate the 'men from the boys' in this fast maturing enterprise software market.

1. Advanced Security Architectures (Inclusive + User Activity Monitoring)
2010 is the year of inclusive security as firms move away from protecting data silos to protecting data itself. It's no longer possible for organizations to protect their operations by hiding behind a firewall. In an era of business social networking, mobility and collaboration, security has become a more sophisticated challenge and governing data has to become the responsibility of the line of business managers. Enterprise Mashup Platforms are now being equipped with capabilities to track user behaviors to ensure that the usage of every data item can be traced from its source via the consumption portal to each individual user (See 'Encanvas Ring-of-Steel' for an example).

2. Cloud Deployment
The migration from running in-house servers to operating IT systems on a cloud computing platform is now well underway in most industry sectors. IT analysts IDC suggest that up to 1/3 of new IT spend will be on cloud computing technologies by 2013. Whilst we haven't seen large ERP migrations (yet) the future of computing will be in the cloud before we know it.

3. Advanced Analytics
A year ago when you said the words 'Business Intelligence' people thought about dashboards. Of course, dashboards are a great way to expose a single page view of what;s going on in a business or process to expose insights that would otherwise remain hidden in spreadsheets and databases. A decade before, business intelligence meant you were talking about 'OLAP cubes' and the ability to create views of enterprise data that was held in disparate systems, decision makers needed to frequently refer to. But the advent of Enterprise Mashup Portals means that today it's not difficult to harvest data from disparate systems from across the enterprise and create custom dashboards and reports (although many vendors do continue to ignore the important role that printed output has to play in disseminating information!). As we've been heading towards 2010 I've seen a transition in buyer expectations away from 'static business intelligence' that offers up preset views of data, towards a more fluid and proactive form of business intelligence. This new generation of business intelligence platform is about moving away from spreadsheet systems towards portal deployed applications that give users the ability to serve themselves with the insights they need. That means features that provide users with the tools to create 'what if?' scenarios have to be available and easy to configure, and data visualization tools need to exist that enable users to define their own maps, visualization structures and data plotting grids without needing to be mathematicians, programmers or scripters. MiddleApps like Encanvas VisualPlot due for release in 2010 provide this level of functionality out of the box and I'm sure that we've only just started on a long journey of user empowerment for business intelligence mashups.

4. Collaborative Social Networking
Business social working is becoming better understood but we have yet to see a clear market leader in this space. I expect this is because the mix of features required for business have yet to materialize in the same product or platform. It's going to be interesting in 2010 to see how businesses react to Encanvas Secure&Live's social office technology that provides a white label environment for creating secure live collaborative environments. I expect that most Enterprise mashup platforms will have integrated with (or will have built their own) business social networking tools by the end of 2010.

5. Applications Stores (AppStores)
The reuse of mashup applications has always been a contentious issue but platforms like Google and Apple's iPhone are showing how effective AppStores are to access and reuse applications. In 2010 we're going to see many organizations looking to build their own AppStores powered by Enterprise Mashup applications.

6. Collective Intelligence
The blend of collaborative social networking and Enterprise Mashup technologies starts to build a coherent information management architecture for the enterprise that is by its very make-up agile, scalable, secure and extensible. It means that 'the system' will be able to interpret who speaks to who, what content they share, the groups individuals belong to, the problems they encounter, the opinions they express, the projects they contribute to, what their colleagues think of them, and all of this information will help systems to filter out for individuals the subject matter information and relationships that matter most. I expect we won't see collective intelligence solutions emerge until late in 2010 but the first few early seeds of examples will no doubt be in place by the end of the year.

So there we have it. The list of new capabilities you can expect from Enterprise Mashup platforms in 2010. If the product you're considering doesn't meet these capabilities then it makes sense to examine some more options.

Gartner top 10 predictions for 2010

So Gartner's top 10 predictions are out for 2010 and it's a very different picture to last year. Nevertheless, it's always interesting to see what the world's leading IT analysts think is going to happen next in the year to come.

In this article I've plucked out the bits that have most to do with Services Oriented Architecture (SOA), Enterprise Mashups, Business Social Networking and other such technologies that are making businesses more agile.

No surprise that Cloud Computing is number 1. The feeding frenzy around cloud computing has been growing for some time and now it's almost impossible for IT leaders not to consider cloud computing as a way forward for their future IT infrastructure. For many organizations however, cloud computing is just another form of commercial model for virtualization of servers; the result of a transformation is a gated environment for enterprise applications on a hosted web server instead of using in-house servers. This myopic view of cloud computing is a big undersell on the possibilities that the cloudspace offers to create extensible community-based portals and possibilities of knowledge markets, federated applications and the like that reach beyond the firewall of the enterprise to harness talent and resources from knowledge markets - but it's a start. I expect that the majority of organizations will want to 'practise' deploying non-core applications to the cloud first and then see how well the experiment works before they consider porting their discrete applications and ERP systems to this new platform. We could be talking a lag of 3 to 5 years before larger corporations make this sort of 'can't turn back the clock' step.

Number 2 on Gartner's list is Advanced Analytics. It's interesting that Gartner worked hard not to say Business Intelligence and came up with a new term. But BI is changing. At one time it was about massing data into huge OLAP cubes to impart knowledge organizations already owned but couldn't see. Today though, business intelligence has gone online and forms part of the Enterprise Mashup Portal platform business people use to consume information services. These applications are no longer passive, but provide tools for users to serve themselves with new views of information, let's them paint 'what if?' scenarios and share their content within their secure social networks. The need for agile Business Intelligence tools has been answered by mashups that form part of the social operating systems organizations are in the process of developing. Advanced Analytics is no longer about OLAP cubes that serve only 15% of the user population; it's about letting decision makers at all levels of the enterprise consume information in new ways to find answers to new questions they've only just begun to think about.

Social Computing comes in at number 6 on the list. Trying to make sense of social networking in a business context has been a tough challenge in 2009. In truth, there are so many different technologies and approaches that the subject has proved too overwhelming for IT leaders to make any sense of. I expect that the take-off in business social networking will only happen when 4 things happen (at the same time and probably in the same software service that business people can try before they buy):
1. A security architecture emerges that business people can trust - Business social networking has to sit within a security blanket that corporate buyers can trust. The software applications and services found in consumer land don't come close to managing content and intellectual property the way that businesses need to.
2. Data can be owner-managed - Organizations want to harness their corporate information capital, while individuals want a record of their social relationship activities. Having knowledge of conversations, talent and skills on Facebook or Twitter doesn't give business people the security or control over information assets that they require.
3. A realistic alternative to email emerges - Email today is the peer-to-peer communications vehicle of choice that benefits from the ability to work even when the sender and receiver are not both online. Without a genuine alternative to email, the home page of most business people will still be Outlook.
4. Supporting social behaviors - In the real world business people chat, have more formal conversations and even more formal scheduled meetings. It's not realistic to believe that, in a virtual world, business people will suddenly be satisfied with informal communications for every situation. Business social networking tools will have to mature to support social behaviors that people are accustomed to.

The fact that Security - and specifically activity monitoring - has only reached number 7 on the list is surprising to me. With all of the concerns raised around data security in 2009 I would have singled out Security as being a top 3 issue. The issue of enterprise security has matured over 2009 away from the idea of protecting the silos of data to protecting the data itself. This has fostered more mature discussions around inclusive security models that see users as individuals rather than good guys and bad guys (where anyone who doesn't work for the enterprise is assumed to be bad). In 2010, Encanvas is releasing its RING OF STEEL inclusive security architecture that enables CIOs to push back data governance to line of business managers so that appropriate governance regimes can be implemented at departmental level. This means that the people responsible for data are also made responsible for its security. For IT leaders this has to be good news. Whoever said that IT leaders must be the security watchdogs of the enterprise anyway?

The last notable entry holds up the list at number 10. Mobile applications are still topical it seems but the idea that mobile applications need to be treated as somehow 'special' is slowly ebbing away. Convergence of web and mobile platforms mean that Enterprise mashup platforms like Encanvas can produce applications for mobility as easily as they do for desktop and web. The mobile device has become 'just another portal consumer' in an always connected world. I expect we won't see mobile applications appearing on the next Gartner list for 2011!

All of the above is good news for Integrated Software Platforms like Encanvas that provide 2-step publishing to the cloud with the assurety of a robust inclusive security model. No surprise that the global market for Enterprise Mashups Software is expected to grow ten-fold in 2010.

Looks like it's going to be a busy year!