Enterprise Mashups - time to relook and mature the concept.

Enterprise Mashups the concept has been around for couple of years now. Till now it has been a hot property in the developer world. In this post I will make an attempt to identify the various stakeholders involved in the development of mash ups and also provide key success criteria for a mashup platform.

Mashup Stake holders and platform requirements:
Some people also describe mashups to be situational applications which according to me in the enterprise context does not do justice to the concept. Situational applications are applicable for web end users who looks to play around with their favorites (provided as services) over the web. This assumption of situational application have so far directed the thought process behind the mashups. It has stick to the realms of an enthusiastic developer's presentation of a hypothetical business context where in 80% of times the mashup culminated in a location based service ending up displaying Google/yahoo maps. Though this visually invigorating appeal was required for the concept to get approval among various stakeholders but now the time has come to mature it further. So who can be the majority of the mashup users in an enterprise?
They without any doubt would be business analysts or domain experts. Thus any mashup platform should cater to the basic requirements of these domain experts for being successful.
Now lets have a look on the list of basic functionality of a mashup platform.

• Service discovery and categorization:- As mashup is built upon service and is also a service, platform shall be capable of discovering the services along with the support of categorizing them.
• Service publishing
• Security :- The platform shall provide secure access to services depending upon the users. It should have inbuilt support to integrate with corporate databases and directories.
• Analysis tools integration:-A process map created using a tool like Visio can be directly used as a enabler point to drag and build service mashup.
• Service invocation and preview: The platform shall have provide the capability to invoke the services and view the results using different previews tables, charts, tree hierarchy etc.

With various frameworks competing for the flesh it would be interesting to see who identify the potential users first and adapt their platform accordingly.