Last year we witnessed the rise of consumer mashups on the Web, with hundreds of individual mashup-based Web applications being released in 2006 alone. I covered this phenomenon in detail in my year-end mashup wrap-up, but now this innovation in software development is gearing up to move inside the enterprise as a raft of tools get ready to provide the tools to make it possible. What will this mean for IT departments and end-users? Let’s take a look.

The motivations for mashups are quite different inside of organizations, where application backlogs and demand for more software that will improve collaboration and productivity are often rampant.In decades past, the new ideas in computing originated in the enterprise world and trickled down to the consumer world later on (things like databases, computer networks, file servers, and so on). However in the Web 2.0 era, for reasons too complex to go into here, new ideas and approaches are germinating more on the consumer Web than from the enterprise space.Mashups are example of this kind of hacker-style creation that emerged from the laboratory of the Web; new high-value applications created out of the raw pieces of other high-value apps. The technique of using the browser itself as the location for rapid, on-the-fly integration of functionality (widgets) and services showed how easy integration could be done on at the point of consumption with simple Web technologies like XML, Ajax, and Javascript snippets. From an enterprise perspective, it gave a lot of people pause to see how easy it could be done (Paul Rademacher’s HousingMaps.com being the original example), compared to the methods used by formal and costly enterprise application integration and service-oriented architecture projects.

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