A number of retail banks have indicated their interest in mashup technologies for their online offerings. They added, however, that they were concerned at the security and legal implications of the opening up to third-party content that such functionality implies. Indeed, by enabling a third-party to come into their online service area, banks are afraid they may become hostages to fortune.
For example, despite the obvious benefits of high net worth or mass affluent customers being able to receive RSS feeds with real-time stock quotes or foreign currency rates, then move their investments around, there is the risk that a customer with dishonorable intentions may upload completely inappropriate types of content. This raises the issue of potential legal liability for the bank. Similarly, a disgruntled customer may organize a protest or distribute criticism of the bank through the same channel.
Thus, there is a need for mashup technology that enables the enterprise which deploys it to control the sources of content and block those which it considers to be inappropriate. To date, the two companies that have launched a heterogeneous mashup capability (i.e. one that works on third-party sources of data/content) are IBM and Serena, though some of the CRM vendors are offering mashups of information from their own platforms.
The offerings from both IBM and Serena are business focused, unlike offerings such as Yahoo Pipes or Popfly from Microsoft, both of which are free and targeted at consumers. It is worth pointing out, however, that the two companies have approached mashups from very different angles.
IBM positions its Mashup Center as an adjunct to its WebSphere Portal offering. Thus, for behind-the-firewall, employee use on the corporate intranet, mashups can be an ad hoc, short term project by someone in a line of business, enabling quick creation of a good enough application. If the application then proves to be useful and has more long term, generic potential, it can be promoted to portlet status within a company portal, at which point the IT department can take full control and the app can be integrated into a centrally managed, controlled enterprise environment.
A customer facing mashup capability (i.e. outside of the corporate firewall on an extranet such as an internet banking site) would still have this kind of control function through tools such as Big Blue’s InfoSphere MashupHub. Presumably, if an account holder comes up with a particularly innovative way of using information in making decisions such as how to move funds around, it could go into a catalog, be rated by their fellow customers and, potentially, be reused by others.
Serena, meanwhile, is a much smaller entity with a very specific background in application lifecycle management and business process management. As such, it sees mashups as an orchestration tool. The company cites as an example Thompson Reuters, where the technology is used to hook into an SAP system of reference and Salesforce.com, enabling people, processes and data to be mashed up for rapid response to customer requests. Another company which it cites is wedding photographer firm Bella Pictures, which has a customer-facing mashup with links into accounting, sales, contractors (i.e. the individual photographers) and clients, as well as payroll.
Again, the Serena Business Mashups technology offers control of content sources, though the company tends to think of its main target as internal users rather than consumers.
Given the demand for mashups and relative success of IBM’s and Serena’s offerings, it will be interesting to see whether any other players in enterprise apps move to offer a heterogeneous mashup capability. The obvious suspect is Oracle, which has the capability as part of its WebCenter suite, but as yet has not done much to promote it as a standalone.
