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Susan Bouchard

Delivering Business Value with Mashups

Part 5 in the Enterprise Web 2.0 Fundamentals Series

By Susan Bouchard on Mon, 07/20/09 - 6:30pm.

A mashup is a lightweight web application created by transforming, merging, and mixing capabilities or information from existing data sources to deliver useful new functionality or dashboard-like aggregations. The broader insights or "big pictures," created by combining the unstructured data found on the Web, with structured data, obtained by secure, custom connectors from legacy applications and databases, are often compelling. Zillow, an example from the consumer space, presents real estate information on a Google Earth map. Kayak, another example, enables users to compare flights and other travel-related information. Catalogues, such as one for Google maps mashups, facilitate the discovery and sharing of a growing portfolio of mashup capabilities. IBM’s easy-to-use visual mashup development environment comes with a set of mashups and connectors, out-of-the-box.

Mashups offer several key advantages and significant business value to the enterprise. Forrester predicts spending on enterprise Web 2.0 technologies globally will grow strongly to $4.6 billion by 2013, with the greatest share going to social networking, Really Simple Syndication (RSS), and mashups. Mashups enable rapid application assembly and prototyping, with ever increasing scalability, policy security, and access control, reducing cost and development time to hours vs. months. Non-technical users can easily assemble and remix data mashups from internal and external sources themselves, allowing IT to focus on strategic business applications. Enterprise, departmental, and personal data can be transformed into fresh, relevant, mashup feeds and services for new markets and new customers, improving return on investment.

Cisco has been leveraging mashup technology to deliver business value for several years. An internal tool called Sales Rack uses Kapow robots to aggregate links to selling content from Cisco's product and marketing business unit sites, eliminating the need for users to visit multiple sites and reducing search time. Mashup technology has also been used to enable rapid prototyping of one of Cisco's Mobile Sales Information Services and several WebEx Connect widgets. Cisco’s Expertise Locator mashup enables locations of employees, who have indicated a particular expertise in the employee Directory, to be displayed on a Google map. Integrated with Cisco’s Unified Communications technology, this mashup indicates the expert’s presence information and enables a user to click to communicate with the expert. This instant access to expertise shortens Cisco’s sales cycle and increases revenue.

Enterprise Web 2.0 Fundamentals, the book I recently co-authored for Cisco Press, provides more detail on ways mashups are delivering business value to Cisco, its customers and partners. Join me here to learn more about the exciting Cisco Web 2.0 story. I'm eager to hear your feedback as we explore the possibility, recognize the opportunity, and realize the potential of Web 2.0 to deliver business value to your enterprise. Safe journey!

About Enterprise Web 2.0 Author Expert: Susan Bouchard

Susan A. Bouchard is a senior business development manager with US-Canada Sales Planning and Operations at Cisco Systems. She focuses on Web 2.0 technology as part of the US-Canada Collaboration initiative, though the opinions expressed here are her own. Susan is a member of Network World's Cisco Subnet blog community.

Susan joined Cisco in 2000 and, as a member of technical staff, helped to establish the Sales IT Partner Architecture Team and led Cisco's Enterprise Architecture Standards and Governance program for five years.

Prior to joining Cisco, Susan was a computer scientist with the Department of the Navy, managing the Navy's e-commerce website for IT products and services. Susan led other software development and support programs for the Navy and Marine Corps in such areas as database administration, artificial intelligence and robotics. Susan’s presentations include:

• Cisco Systems Case Study: Collaboration, Innovation and Mobility-The Productivity Triple Play on behalf of Dow Jones at the Gartner Customer Relationship Management Summit, September 2008
• Cisco Systems Case Study: EA Foundation Delivers Mobile Service Value at Shared Insights’ Enterprise Architectures Conference, March 2007
• Cisco Systems Case Study: Architecture Review Process-Improving the IT Portfolio at DCI’s Enterprise Architectures Conference, October 2005.

Susan's latest book, Enterprise Web 2.0 Fundamentals, is the July, 2009, book giveaway selection for Cisco Subnet.

To enter for your chance to win the monthly book giveaway, see the Cisco Subnet home page for contest details.

Read an excerpt, Chapter 9: Web 2.0 and Mobility hosted exclusively by Cisco Subnet.

 

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