Today, the founding of the Open Mashup Alliance (OMA) was officially announced to promote the interoperability and adoption of Enterprise Mashup Solutions.

This is an important step towards growing the understanding in the market of the value of Enterprise Mashups, as evidenced by the quality of companies supporting the Alliance: Adobe, Bank of America, Capgemini, Hinchcliffe & Company, HP, Intel, JackBe, Kapow Technologies, ProgrammableWeb, Synteractive, and Xignite.

Dion Hinchcliffe has written several excellent articles on the OMA and Mashups in the Enterprise over on his blog at ZDNet that would be well worth your time to check out.  In addition, consider this article by John Waters on Application Development Trends.

Dion sheds light on the origin of mashups and quite possibly the reason why many view them as lightweight consumer applications:  “In decades past, the new ideas in computing originated in the enterprise world and trickled down to the consumer world….  However in the Web 2.0 era… new ideas and approaches are germinating more on the consumer Web…  Mashups are example of this kind of hacker-style creation that emerged from the laboratory of the Web…  From an enterprise perspective, it gave a lot of people pause to see how easy it could be done (Paul Rademacher’s HousingMaps.com being the original example), compared to the methods used by formal and costly enterprise application integration and service-oriented architecture projects.”

The potential for Mashups in the Enterprise are bounded only by your imagination.  If you’re interested in learning more, please check out this webinar on solving real-world business problems to give your workers a competitive advantage with Enterprise Mashups.  Also, here is a demo on how to mashup data from multiple websites like Linkedin or Jigsaw to build a sales dashboard that enables sales executives to harvest relevant, valuable web data about existing and potential clients.  And lastly, learn more about how Cisco uses Mashups in the Enterprise.

If that’s not enough to whet your appetite for Enterprise Mashups, Business Insights just released their report, The Future of Enterprise Mashups: Demand, challenges and vendor opportunities, where they predict the mashup market will grow from $161M in 2008 to $1.74B by 2013. That’s a ten-fold increase in 5 years!

Alliances like OMA will certainly help to accelerate this to where Mashups will soon be mainstream.

By:  Stefan Andreasen

Please check out Dana Gardner’s Briefings Direct podcast for a lively discussion with Howard Dresner and myself around how “Web Data Services and Web-based Information Pave the Way for Better Decision Making”.  Enjoy the show and gain valuable insight to the future of Business Intelligence!  Howard is President and Founder of Dresner Advisory Services, and also inventor of the term “Business Intelligence”.

I really enjoyed being a guest on DM Radio’s broadcast last week where we discussed “Innovation in Information Management”.

We live in a time of rapid change through an accelerated flow of information.  The time span between market fluctuations and subsequently the time to make appropriate decisions in direction or strategy is shortening each day.  More than ever it’s become necessary to look into the “crystal ball” to know what’s ahead so we can react quicker (and correctly).

The “old school” solution is to pre-build all the data access you could ever think of so it’s ready when you need it. This is the normal approach of SOA, Data Warehousing and Data Integration products.  It’s very resource intensive with a “something’s bound to stick” approach to providing the right data at the right time.

The “new approach” is to provide IT with the tools so they can deliver relevant, timely data from anywhere in an on-demand fashion when it is needed.

When I was asked, “What is the biggest innovation you have seen in data governance?” I responded that I’ve seen a common thread where most of the innovation is powered by enabling technologies with Web Data.  And it’s not simply a “better, cheaper, faster” approach, but quite honestly a paradigm shift in taking advantage of the accelerated world to turbo-charge business intelligence tools with web data services.

That’s real innovation in an accelerated world.

By:  Stefan Andreasen

Check out Stefan on Information Management Magazine’s DM Radio broadcast, “Innovation in Information Management”, this Thursday, September 10, 2009, at 3pm EST.  Listen in on how Web Data Services are redefining the traditional boundaries of Information Management with more cost-effective, automated processes to access, enrich, and serve data.  Tune in to DM Radio and enjoy the show.

Our “No Coding” tagline has resonated with many of you.  Thank you for the support and positive comments in the media and your blogs.  Disruptive technologies often have the opposite effect e.g. making people uncomfortable.  The Kapow Web Data Server is truly a paradigm shift – radically changing how traditionally complex migration of data between source and destination systems or turning applications into web services is done.

Many customers have described to me the “aha” moment they’ve had.  Across the board, our customers kept saying to us, “the amazing thing about the Web Data Server is that it requires no coding”.  It’s great when your customers do your marketing for you!

Two revolutionary inventions with the Kapow Web Data Server are key to our ability to eliminate traditional coding associated with Business Intelligence, Data Integration, and application integration projects:

1.    Existing applications can be easily accessed as-is through their HTML/AJAX front-end through our point-and-click visual development tool, eliminating the need to deal with proprietary APIs.  Even better, it’s done in the context of the content owner or business user (through what they see in their web browser), eliminating any misunderstandings that occur when explaining to coders what needs to be done i.e. translating business/ functional requirements to technical specs.

2.    Instant, visual feedback allows results to be seen on the spot – delivering high productivity and time to market improvements.

We have several videos on our website demonstrating how users easily access, enrich, and serve web data with “no coding”:

•    Harvest the web for pricing and market intelligence

•    Access and serve web data from Linkedin, Jigsaw and more with no coding

In fact, the tool is intuitive and easy enough that even our marketers have been known to build their own Kapow robots to harvest web data.

But programmers love our product even more.  Why?  It makes them more productive.  With a visual interface, real-time feedback, and 100% accuracy, programmers get more done in a lot less time.

All Content Migration, data warehouse ETL, data integration and application development projects require an iterative process, from first attempt until solved.

With traditional methods, each iteration can take weeks and even months to get it right.  This is cumbersome and frustrating for most.

The Kapow Web Data Server cuts down each iteration to 3 simple steps (measured in minutes):

1.    Visually instruct what you want (without coding), just like working with the data in a web browser (point and click).

2.    See the end result in real-time, right in the middle of instructing how and what to do.  (Since this happens real-time, step 1 and 2 are basically the same… but would you  believe me if I called it a 2 step process?)

3.    Modify instructions based on the instant, visual feedback, i.e. go back to step 1.

This extremely quick turn-around per iteration with the Kapow Web Data Server allows you to get to 100% of what you want.  100% accuracy in 1/10th the time.  And did I mention “no coding”?

Don’t just take my word for it, please check out what Intel and Audi had to say about Kapow.

Technology continues to evolve.  The market demands it.  Register for our free trial.  It really works.

By:  Stefan Andreasen