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Mashups: The future of portals

Many enterprises that have multiple portals would eventually move towards mashups. Enterprise portals will begin aggregating various portals internally in mashups to do away with the complexities, which multiple portals bring in says Abhinav Singh

Gartner analyst David Gootzit’s recent presentation on the future of portals at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo revealed a few interesting nuggets during his interaction with the audience. Two facts emerged:

• An average enterprise had three portals.
• Including visits to banking applications and consumer portals there are about six portal visits per user.

Closer home, the trend of having multiple portals prevails. The average enterprise had three portals. Take the case of ICICI where ICICI Bank, ICICI Lombard and ICICI Direct all have separate portals. Or the government’s utility payment portals for services such as electricity and water. Indian Railways has multiple portals for its divisionsnorth, south, east and west and many more. Although there are complexities caused by multiple portals, a greater and more common problem is caused by the complexities of having multiple applications (a portal is just one type, but think of the myriad applications in addition to portals). A typical organization has hundreds of applications spanning all aspects of its business and the majority of IT spend, about 75% of the typical IT budget, goes into maintaining these applications. However, IT budgets are not growing, and for every IT project approved in the average enterprise there are ten more application requests. The result: an ever-growing application backlog caused by multiple portals. Therefore there is no doubt that the future of portals is Mashups, SOA and more aggregation.

Too many portals = excess

Portals help enterprises aggregate data but multiple portals dilute the value of that aggregation since one has to go to multiple portals to get hold of information. As per an Oracle India spokesperson users have to remember multiple URLs (one per portal) for accessing information from the same organization. They have to remember which portal contains what information. This is quite analogous to customers and users having to go to three different portals of a bank or any other utility organization as opposed to going to a single portal for all their requirements. Additionally as per the Oracle spokesperson very often multiple portals have their own security infrastructure and an organization has to spend additional resources in providing single sign-on across multiple portals. Also the quality of service being offered by the organization suffers, especially the ability to cross sell products and services. Having multiple portals also eats up costly application development resources and since IT is in the business of building and maintaining mission-critical infrastructure it increases the workload of the already strained IT infrastructure by having multiple applications to support different multiple portals.

Mashups are the future

A mashup is a Web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool. For example, one of the big catalysts for the advent of mashups was Google’s introduction of its Google Maps API. This opened the floodgates, allowing Web developers (plus hobbyists, tinkerers, and others) to mash all sorts of data (everything from nuclear disasters to Boston’s CowParade cows) onto maps. Not to be left out, APIs from Microsoft (Virtual Earth), Yahoo (Yahoo Maps), and AOL (MapQuest) followed in short order.

Mashups allow users to not only aggregate data, but also coordinate business activities. Tim Zonca, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Serena Software, explained, “Mashups combine people, process and information and it means that the right people see the right information at the right time and do not need to application-jump to different portals to see different sets of information.” Zonca also added, “Mashups help business and IT to work together to address the application backlog by enabling business analysts and tech-savvy business people to build their own composite applications in the form of mashups—that bring people, process and data together, without writing any code.”

Additionally besides aggregation, mashups can be built and deployed without consuming valuable IT resources and enabling organizations to beat the application backlog. Superficially business mashups bring together people, processes and data. Under the hood there are human workflows to coordinate business activities, data elements for customized data mashing, security for mashup governance, custom end-user forms for the people using the mashups and system orchestrations to tie data from existing applications into the mashups. Zonca said, “Beyond the technologies involved, a key mashup strategy allows an organization to build Mashups without requiring coding resources, so that a masher need not understand the underlying technology that runs the mashup.”

The Oracle spokesperson said that mashups give the ability to aggregate content and services from external sources into a single portal. This allows an organization to offer new products and services a lot quicker, i.e. a Travel Industry portal could aggregate content from the meteorological dept, hotels, airlines etc. to offer holiday packages. Technologically too the mashup model focuses on the simplest techniques and formats, snippets of Javascript scripting language and XML-based feeds for instance, which are both in widespread use on the Web and somewhat standardized into the new generation of Web browsers. Increasingly, Web sites are providing such technical access and formats for their published content making it easier to pull the same into even richer widgets and feeds for recomposing new mashups. From the more traditional software perspective, mashups are a user-oriented icon for software-as-a-service. Mashups require no lengthy installation, no complex maintenance and update releases, and present virtually no administration headaches.

Additionally mashups effectively use the wealth and reach of the Web to bring data and processes, remotely located and provided, to bear on problems at hand. Mashups are the user-facing version of the “reusing components” goal of software methodologies. In contrast to the mitigated results of previous cycles, such as modular programming and object-oriented programming which were invented by and for specialists, Mashups are bound to a much more convincing success as they directly address end-users’ needs and requirements, and instantly leverage the formidable reach, ubiquity and popularity of the Web standards and protocols.

Vendors optimistic about mashups

Some vendors like Serena and Oracle are optimistic about the future of mashups. Serena’s Business Mashups that allows organizations to build their own composite applications. Business Mashups combine people, processes and data. It provides solutions to everyday business problems and is easy to build and deploy them so that non technical IT persons and tech-savvy business people (commonly called ‘mashers’) can build and deploy their own mashups without having to write a line of code. Zonca explained, “We’re excited about mashups because we have seen a tremendous response from the marketplace for solutions to address the backlog. People also want a pragmatic way to solve everyday business problems without having to write code.Business Mashups combine the ease-of-use and pragmatism of Web 2.0 with the governance and re-use of service-orientation so the business to innovate while IT maintains governance, all without requiring code to be written.”

Similarly the WebCenter Suite from Oracle is one such product as it provides a core component, OmniPortlet, which allows business developers to quickly leverage Web services; RSS or XML feeds as data sources for their enterprise mashups. Using a wizard-based approach, business users can produce new mashups from all the standard feeds that developers produce. In addition, developers can easily build AJAX-based user interfaces and add them into the wizard for users to select. For instance a developer can provide a Web service that lists a sales representative’s key customers and this context can be passed to the pending proposals for each of the customers as the sales representative scrolls from one customer to the next. Someone in the Support organization could use the same Web service to view the list of customers, but combine it or “mash it up” with a list of open issues. With this support engineer will be able to quickly respond to each issue for each customer as they arise.

Needless to say, mashups afford many more advantages and benefits to different classes of players in the software industry. Mashups, because they are open and highly visible, encourage information sharing and transparency and promote participation and sharing, adding a social facet to the Web based GUI they are initially used for. Mashups foster better identification and further segmentation of user populations thereby making them more popular in the near future.

abhinav.singh@expressindia.com