Mashups for the Enterprise

Can Mashups be useful in an enterprise setup, or are they only for those who fun loving folks to put things together and do wired stuff?

Well, you can do use Mashups in an enterprise setup. How?

Decision supporting tools are very welcome in decision making in an organization. Often, we have data, lots of them, available in various forms. SOA technologies available today make the data readily accessible, with ease, across systems. However, they are still data. What is required is to have meaning to those data, in other words to turn them into information to help make decisions that would direct the enterprise in the right direction. Mashups can help here, aggregating multiple services into one stop shop information sources.

As an example, you could use a Mashup to track how you are doing with your CRM. Aggregate CRM data into a Mashup dashboard to monitor customer queries, their frequencies, time to respond, and the like.

Now, in order to do this, you need tools, serious tools, tools like WSO2 Mashup Server.

If you look into the CRM example that I mentioned above, you need to be able to access data as services, and then aggregate those into meaningful representations. According to the overview of the technical capabilities of the Mashup server, provided by Channa, the product manager for the project, you can easily deal with data services. Not only that, in the CRM example, security is paramount, as you would not want the sensitive data like those on your customers to be leaked out. So you need, trusted, proved and battle tested security system in place. And again, as Channa has explained, WSO2 Mashup server is equipped with such security capabilities.

mooshup.com, an online hosted instance of WSO2 Mashup server not only shows that it works, but also proves that it is battle tested.

All the features in the WSO2 Mashup server are well thought of and put in place to help the enterprises use Mashups. However, you are still only interested in the fun part of it, nothing prohibits you from that.