Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Enterprise Mashups Vs Composite Apps

Today morning, while I was driving, I was listening to 'Enterprise Mashups' podcast from Gartner.

It immediately triggered one interesting question - what is the difference between Enterprise Mashups and Composite Applications?.

Some of the observations:

1. Enterprise Mashup are addressed to 'Long Tail' of the enterprise. They are primarily targeted to individuals or small teams. Composite applications are the cousins of Mashups in Enterprise applications world.

2. Enterprise Mashups - Development and Management/Governance is left to individuals/Community.

3. Enterprise Mashups are 'assembled' by individuals/small teams. Composites are 'built' or 'developed'.

4. Enterprise Mashups are not supposed to have any business logic on its own. Composites can have business logic / orchestration logic.

5. Composite applications are much more critical/serious in nature compared to Enterprise Mashups. So, Composites are typically left to IT development teams officially. Composites require a strong governance as well.

6. Enterprise Mashups are based on web 2.0 'Culture' rather than 'Technology'. Composites have their roots in 'Mashups' and 'Web 2.0' but there is more technology flavour to it.

7. Enterprise Mashups are loosely-coupled. Composites are also loosely-coupled, but not to the extent of Mashups.

I think, from pragmatic perspective, its is the company's 'culture' and 'organization structure' that is going to be the key decision factor in web 2.0 or Enterprise Mashup initiatives.

From today's world, it looks like the 'solutions' are pushed to the IT shop to try out new things like web 2.0, Mashups, etc... What is the need of the hour is 'Identification of problem statements or potential pain points or improvement areas' that could be alleviated by these new solutions.

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