Enterprise mashups: Tools build data integrations |
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By Rob Barry, News Writer
28 Oct 2009 | SearchSOA.com |
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Organizations have long labored under an outstanding backlog of data integration, business intelligence and customized reporting jobs. Over the years a variety of technologies have arisen to address these or similar problems - most recently, so-called enterprise mashups.
Enterprise mashups have arisen in recent years as a tool said to let end-users — with some help from developers - build their own data integrations. Services are central to most of these offerings — often too are Ajax front-ends. Still, the enterprise mashup space is notable for diversity. Data staging, publish-and-subscribe messaging, XML data mining and other traits may be included at different times.
Mashups present data from a number of internal and/or external disparate data sources in one unified dashboard. Among a host of enterprise mashup and related software specialists are Active Endpoints, Actuate, Composite Software, Cordys, Denodo Technologies, IBM, JackBe, Kapow Technologies and others.
As always, when evaluating options, culture counts; that is to say: different organizations will find favor in different approaches. How close users are to data, how much analytical ease any mashup brings to the job of working with data – this is important.
Vendors variously focus on BPM-oriented mashups, data-oriented mashups and vivid front-end data visualization visualization. Of wide interest at the moment for the mashup crew are business intelligence apps, where diverse data sources are tolled up to provide a useful analytical view of the corporation.
Forrester Research's James Kobielus, analyst, laid out a range of enterprise mashup types for BI:
- Lightweight presentation mashup that pulls data out of applications so users can generate reports. No data warehouses are used here.
- Deep presentation mashup backed by a data warehouse and a large pool of analytic data.
- Full BI mashup in a federated environment. The user sees a logical unified semantic virtualization and can pull data from various systems/databases in a transparent way.
- Full collaborative mashup with IT governance policies around what a user can mash up. Data here is stored in a central repository and accessed through sets of permissions.
In this grouping, level 1 mashup maturity implies no prior BI experience whereas level 4 is practically nonexistent in today's enterprises.
Forrester's Kobielus said there are about as many ways to do mashups as there are enterprises. Integration style all depends on the data infrastructure and the company culture. Of the major vendors, he said those interested in enterprise BI mashups should watch Microsoft Project Gemini and IBM Cognos. These two products are advanced enough to help attain level 4 mashup maturity.
But before any enterprise can start dealing with mashups, it needs to get its approach down.
"Mashups won't succeed in a BI context unless it's fun, unless its highly interactive and the user says 'wow that's totally easy to use let me use that so I can build my reports,'" said Kobielus. "If it's approached where IT is forcing self-service on reluctant users, I think it will fail. It's got to be user enthusiasm that drives this."
"The key is to break up the work a bit," said Robert Eve, EVP of marketing at data virtualization vendor Composite Software. "We work on the data plumbing side. You have your data-oriented people - your data architects. Then you have people more focused on the business consumer and the application usage to work on the visualization side."
Composite Software helps its customers develop business intelligence (BI) mashups by providing a server to virtualize and federate data from multiple sources. In effect, it is a layer that mirrors the data and sends it directly to the system providing the mashups.
Enterprise Mashups: A three-part special report.
Part 1: Tools build data integrations
Part 2: User story--Pfizer uses mashups to shape IT culture
Part 3: In search of mashup standards
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