Enterprise Mashups

My name is Ross Dargahi and I'm a Co-Founder and Vice President of Engineering at Zimbra. Today I'm going to talk to you about enterprise mashups. The consumer space has certainly led the mashup craze but traditionally information has been in silos. We've had maps, for examples and package tracking and, for example, traffic information.

And the user has typically interacted with these in a silo fashion such that they've had their browser and they've connected to traffic to get traffic information then had to go to a map site to get map information. And then finally if they wanted to track their Fed Ex package, they go to Fed Ex and track the package.

With the advent of services oriented architecture, or SOA, and the use of Ajax we now can get a lot more compelling experience for the consumer. We can essentially aggregate information in interesting ways. For example, we've seen Google Maps plus Fed Ex enabling me to track a package as it makes its way across the country to my front door. Yahoo Maps plus Traffic allows me to map my directions and then see how long it's going to take me to get there.

Yahoo's gone even further and they've added business services that allow me not only to map directions and see how long it's going to take me to get there but also find out the Starbucks along the way. These are pretty cool, compelling, and a lot of fun to use.

But let's take a look in the enterprise. Much the same as information has been silo-ed in the consumer space, we seen the same in enterprise. In the enterprise we have customer relation management systems, we have enterprise resource planning systems, we have of course the ever ubiquitous e-mail and we have calendaring systems, just as a few examples.

And again, these have been typically very silo-ed so the user would use either a native desktop application or a web application using the browser to access these various systems. So, for example, to approve a PO the user would connect to the PO system, pull up the PO, approve or reject it. The same with e-mail, it would load my e-mail application and interact with the messaging system.

Again, if we go and provide service oriented architecture on top of these information repositories, we can do some very interesting things. Let me give you an example. Imagine I receive an e-mail from an employee and in that e-mail there's a PO number. And imagine that the employee is asking me to approve that PO. He's saying Ross, this is an urgent PO, we've got to get these widgets into the company right away so we can ship them out to a customer.

Now, traditionally what I would have to do is be connected to my e-mail application. Then I would have to switch to the PO system, log in, search for the PO, read it, approve it, switch back to the e-mail application and respond to my employee saying that I've approved or rejected the PO. However, with the power of SOA and Ajax what I can do is hover over the PO number in the mail application and perhaps get a bubble, which has a description and the dollar amount. And right in place I might have an approval or a rejection button.

So from within the context of my mail application I can approve or reject the PO and respond directly to the employee. That's really powerful. That's really compelling and it really enhances my productivity. And that is the power of the enterprise mashup.