Oct 26
Over the summer I was interviewed by Richard Absalom of Global Business Insights on The Future of Enterprise Mashups. Below you will find an executive summary of Richard’s report including information on the major players in this market. Take a look a the Executive Summary and for more detailed information, you can contact Global Business Insights for the full report. Feel free to contact me with any questions you may have about DreamFace Interactive and Enterprise Mashups.
Susan Haimet, Co-Founder, DreamFace Interactive, susan@dreamface.org
THE FUTURE OF ENTERPRISE MASHUPS
Demand, challenges and vendor opportunities
By Richard Absalom, Executive summary
The Mashup Market
- Enterprise mashup market growth will be driven by factors including the growing involvement of the major software players, evolving market definition and knowledge about mashups, emerging standards, increased uptake of SOA and cloud computing, and the impact of the recession.
- Investment in the enterprise mashup market has mainly come from publicly listed parent companies using funds to start up a new business unit, venture capital firms, business angels, and startup founders bootstrapping their own organizations.
- Large organizations are more likely to have adopted mashups than smaller businesses.
- Of those organizations which do not currently use mashups, many do not know if and when they will adopt them.
- The majority of organizations that do use mashups plan to highly increase their usage in the future.
- The enterprise mashup market will benefit from the increasing prevalence of software incorporating SOA.
- In order to fill the open space in market leadership issues of market definition, governing standards, educating the market and making mashups available to clients of all sizes must be addressed.
- It is hard to predict exactly who the eventual leaders in the space may be and when they may emerge, with various different types of vendors competing. Major software players such as IBM have the advantage in terms of recognition and resources, while the smaller innovators often have superior technology on offer.
- Standards governing widgets and markup languages will begin to emerge through 2010-2012.
The Enterprise Demand and Unmet Need
- Customer relationship management, business intelligence and business process management are the highest priority business areas for the majority of organizations.
- Mashups can offer improvements in CRM, BI and BPM systems, and vendors should highlight these factors when talking to clients.
- End-users do not currently view mashups to be particularly attractive in terms of measurable benefits to the bottom line, return on investment or cost, but this could change as the market matures and more evidence of their benefits becomes available.
- Efficiency and cost are the most important factors for the majority of organizations when choosing a type of vendor to implement a new high priority software solution.
- Systems integrators and SaaS vendors are most trusted to implement new software solutions. Mashup vendors are not currently well trusted to implement solutions.
- Systems integrators are the most popular type of partners for mashup vendors, boding well for the future due to the popularity of systems integrators amongst end-users.
- Effective marketing strategies include involving partners, advertising, attending trade shows and industry events, running seminars and webinars, and making full use of Web 2.0 technologies. Marketing is key to growth for mashup vendors as they attempt to ‘educate the market’.
Challenges and Barriers to Mashup Market Growth
- Enterprise mashup vendors face most competition from other mashup vendors, ‘traditional’ proprietary software models and in-house application development.
- Mashups have the potential to be a disruptive force on the IT applications market but also have a complementary nature, working alongside and extending the functionality of legacy systems.
- The biggest risks when using mashups are the lack of standards, security, reliability, governance, and the varying availability of web services and APIs.
- Vendors are, unsurprisingly, prone to be far more optimistic about the risks surrounding mashups than end-users. They face a big challenge in changing potential clients’ viewpoints in this sense.
- Enterprise mashups are still an unknown commodity to many business users, and there is a big opportunity for mashup vendors to convince large numbers of potential clients that mashups can offer them business value.
- Many mashup users are still unsure as to the exact extent of their impact on their organization’s bottom line.
- Other market challenges that mashups face are the lack of leading platforms and sets of standards, skills shortages, and executive culture and misperceptions.
- The majority of vendors and business users agree that although mashups should be end-user driven and focused, their usage in an organization should be centrally governed by the CIO and the IT department. Enterprise mashups do not spell the end of the IT manager.
The Vendor Landscape
- Vendor types can be broadly divided into two categories offering different types of mashups: Process and Presentation Platforms; and Data Platforms.
- Corizon targets large organizations in heavily regulated verticals within the European market, providing highly scalable mashups. It aims to expand into the US market in 2010.
- DreamFace Interactive is relatively new to the market with its flagship product launching in June 2009. It is small but ambitious, aiming to become a major player in the enterprise mashup space.
- With a comprehensive platform offering and large existing client and partner base, IBM Mashup Center has the backing, the will and the clout to lead the way in themashup market.
- JackBe has been making a lot of noise in the space, actively promoting mashup usage. It is looking to capitalize on this exposure and show that mashups are no longer just ‘cool’, but genuinely useful in a business sense.
- Microsoft offers the ability to create mashups through SharePoint, a suite of software elements that focuses mainly on enterprise content management.
- If Oracle plans to make a bigger impression in the space, it has the resources and client base to make WebCenter Suite a popular platform for creating mashups.
- Salesforce.com has a good opportunity to provide exposure to the benefits of mashups through the success of its SaaS based CRM platform. Its clients can create, share and use composite applications on the Force.com platform.
- Serena Software differs from most vendors in that it offers both a data and a process mashup platform. It is attempting to engage the SMB market by offering a pay-per-use on demand model.
- WaveMaker is small but growing fast, and has positioned itself well in terms of software and mashup partners to take advantage of the growing mashup market.
- French based Convertigo has a strong data harvesting and integration offering, and will need to increase its marketing activity and exposure to capitalize on this as it ventures into the US market.
- Denodo Technologies is in a strong position in the data integration space and is looking to expand further through new partnerships and new markets, while continuously improving its platform and taking it into the cloud.
- Kapow Technologies offers strong web harvesting capabilities, turning any web page into a service to be used in mashups. It is planning to introduce a transactionbased model in order to penetrate the SMB market.
- RatchetSoft targets small to mid-range clients, offering unobtrusive data mashups. It is planning to greatly increase indirect sales and move away from offering direct services, leaving this to partners and focusing on its software offering.
The Future of the Enterprise Mashup Market
- Data harvesting and data mashups will become more important to combat the lack of available web services and APIs.
- Taking enterprise mashups into the cloud to provide an on-demand platform will allow more organizations to use mashups, and will mean that vendors keep up with developments in the wider software market.
- As mashup platform and widget development continues, enterprise mashups will become ever quicker and easier for end-users to create and use.
- Mobile mashups offer interesting possibilities for the future as mobile web devices become more prevalent in the enterprise environment.
- The hype surrounding enterprise mashups has generally ignored the key challenges standing in the way of market growth, and has focused too much on process and visual mashups rather than discussing the potential of data mashups.
- Even if they have been overhyped, it is clear that enterprise mashups can deliver real business value to organizations that adopt them by offering benefits particularly in terms of cost and efficiency that proprietary software systems cannot match.
- It is increasingly being demonstrated that mashups can meet enterprise requirements in security and scalability.
- The mashup market will grow as the wider market becomes more aware and knowledgeable about the capabilities of the technology.
DreamFace, the DreamFace logo, DreamFace Interactive, are trademarks of DreamFace Interactive, SARL. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
For the full report please contact:
Chris Upjohn
Business Development - Technology & Telecoms
Business Insights
119 Farringdon Road, London, EC1R 3DA, United Kingdom
Tel: (+44) 207 551 9569
Fax: (+44) 207 551 9343
or visit