Enterprise Mashups (continued)
I can usually rely on SandHill.com for thought provoking business, technology, and venture capital articles, but a recent article by Guy Smith falls short of the usual.
While I admire his ability to be creative in regards to what might constitute an enterprise mashup, the reality is that the engineering costs alone might far exceed what a customer would pay for a finished product.
I have obsessed endlessly about enterprise mashups. Customers love what can be done, but the fully burdened cost of amalgamating disparate interfaces is expensive. And you can’t just expect to create an application that becomes the “new interface” or console. That’s an even harder battle to fight. Dashboards by themselves are not interesting enough to rush out and develop mashups.
That brings up the old question of value. What value can your core application add that’s not being supplied through another vendor’s API? If you’re application is doing little more than tying a couple of APIs together, then neither is it that interesting nor is the barrier to entry in whatever you’re doing all that great.
For enterprise mashups to work, they have to be multi-dimensional in my opinion. In other words, you create middle-tiers that exposes new functionality from what’s gained in mashing multiple APIs together, create your own interface on the other end and then add value to other applications that normally wouldn’t have any knowledge whatsoever about the mashed entities. (More on this later…maybe.)