When Companies Do the Mash

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Mashups are often used to help sales staff more readily clinch deals. E*Trade wanted to give its sales teams new software features, so it mashed up its homegrown customer relationship management system with software from Salesforce.com. "We really wanted to avail ourselves of some of the nice features that a product like Salesforce.com provides," says E*Trade Chief Information Officer Greg Framke.

Making Companies More Collaborative

Another area where mashups can make a difference is in collaboration among employees from different parts of a business. "Complex collaborative problem solving is one of the last places we haven't automated," says Hinchcliffe. In fact, somewhere between 25% to 50% of employees exchange information with colleagues, customers, and suppliers, and make judgments by drawing on many different forms of information, according to a recent report by consulting firm McKinsey & Co. Industries where more than 50% of employees use complex collaborative problem solving include insurance, securities, and health care.

In many cases, employees won't even realize they're using mashups. Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, and JDS Uniphase have begun to use a Web application from Rearden Commerce to make travel and dining reservations. Rearden Commerce provides a marketplace of corporate services, essentially mashing up many services from different providers in the areas of travel, dining, entertainment, conferencing, and package shipping (see BusinessWeek.com, 9/21/05, "A Man for All Services"). Rearden Commerce is integrated with corporate applications such as Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes so that travel and dining reservations automatically appear on an employee's calendar once they're made.

The next frontier for some companies is figuring out how to break products and services down into components that consumers will be able to mash up on their own. "Someone could take a component from E*Trade and mash it up with something from Quicken or Yahoo or Google or anywhere they wanted, to form something that's new and interesting," says Framke, who expects E*Trade to start providing such components to consumers in 2007.

Tools for Consumers and Business

Already, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have made maps available, so companies can create mapping applications, one of the most common mashups for enterprises. In an effort to lure potential buyers, Coldwell Banker Commercial took the property listings on its Web site and mashed them up with demographic data from Claritas and a mapping application from Microsoft.

Companies like Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, and WebEx are opening up their products so that third-party developers can mash in other capabilities. In January, Salesforce.com started AppExchange, an online service where companies can buy business applications that have already been mashed up with Salesforce.com (see BusinessWeek.com, 8/22/06, "Salesforce Dives into the Mash Pit"). Today, that marketplace boasts more than 400 applications, giving companies the ability to essentially buy customized on-demand software.

Experts say that although enterprise mashups promise to help make software development easier, they also present a new set of challenges. One of the key characteristics of enterprise mashups is that they put more power in the hands of end users. "The average IT establishment is reluctant to give users more power," says Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at consulting firm ZapThink. The answer, he says, is for the IT department to provide oversight, defining what kinds of mashups are allowed, and then to govern that process. Software and service vendors can help companies implement management tools.

Foremost Challenge: Security

In most mashups, companies will use external services over which they have no direct control. "When you develop a mashup, you need to rely completely on that service," says Kirk Crenshaw, vice-president of Demandbase, a small software company that uses Salesforce.com mashups.

Other possible challenges include user identification, especially when mashing up two or more applications or Web services that each require user IDs and passwords. Once companies decide to allow data such as customer records to be used in mashups, they need to be able to make sure it's secure and accessible only to certain employees to guard against privacy breaches. "You always need to worry about security and performance," says John Crupi, CTO of JackBe, a company that sells enterprise mashup software.

Security and reliability are front of mind for Hababou at Société Générale as he considers ActiveGrid's handiwork. "We have to be sure that we have all the processes and all the tools to be able to monitor this application in production," he says. Right now, ActiveGrid is in the early stages of demonstrating its software to technology experts in Société Générale's Paris office.

"It will be a long process," says Hababou, "but these talks are a start."

Rachael King is a writer for BusinessWeek.com in San Francisco.