With the number of portals per organisation increasing rapidly, companies are looking forward to adopt Business Mashups for the easy manageability of portals. Munindra Kumar Bhartee, managing director, Serena Software, shares his company’s initiatives to push the concept further with Biztech2.0.

How important are Business Mashups for organisations handling multiple portals?

Portals can help enterprises aggregate data but multiple portals dilute the value of that aggregation since one has to visit multiple portals to get hold of any information. Business Mashups will change the way organisations use portals. They will allow users to not only aggregate data, but also coordinate business activities. Mashups combine people, processes and information, which 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.

Could you throw some light on the recently announced Mashup Exchange by Serena Software?

Last week, we have launched Serena Mashup Exchange, an online marketplace where "mashers" can find, buy and sell pre-built Mashups, Web services and professional services. Partners and users can collaborate on projects that are individually too small to warrant dedicated IT support. The launch of the online marketplace represents another milestone in Serena’s plan to reinvent its business around Web 2.0 technologies and user-driven transformations taking place within enterprises.
Business Mashups are placed before enterprises as solutions to help deal with business problems. Business Mashups allow users to combine visual and data elements from multiple sources within a process-driven framework. Unlike consumer or data mashups, Business Mashups keep the state of the user’s process in progress and provide the data and visual elements together as and when required by the user.

How will your partnership with CapGemini help customers?

One of our strategies to help spur the adoption of Business Mashup is to partner with other business and technology leaders. The market for Business Mashup is just emerging and we have a shared commitment with CapGemini to help bring new web-based, consumer-oriented technology into the enterprise so workers can address business issues on their own rather than relying on IT. CapGemini’s RAIN (Rapid Innovation) environment was created to help enterprises discover, develop and deliver sustainable new business models. Our partnership with CapGemini will allow us to leverage their consulting expertise and RAIN environment to help customers solve business issues using Business Mashup.

What are the benefits of Business Mashup and how do you see the future of Business Mashup shaping up?

Business Mashup allows users to create automated processes and further tie these processes in with multiple back-end or cloud-based systems while providing the unified experience all of us have come to expect from Mashup. By using Business Mashup, companies will be able to enhance their ability to solve business problems by providing faster, cheaper access to the right information and IT capabilities. Business Mashups will also allow companies to leverage their Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) investments. The problem many companies have had with SOA is that it is largely inwardly focused. It provides a solution though, as it lets users share their resulting services by making them part of a service-generating network and letting users plug in data from outside the enterprise.

The adoption of Business Mashup is still at a nascent stage. According to Forrester, global enterprise spending on Mashup will only amount to $61 million in 2008. Companies are slowly putting together fragmented pieces, which will ensure widespread adoption of Business Mashups from licensing to delivery models (Mashups-as-a-Service) to partners. By now, we have these factors in place and expect healthy adoption of our Business Mashups in the near future in India and the rest of the world.

How do you think following the SaaS model for Business Mashup will help vendors and customers?

At first, our Serena Business Mashups were only available on-premise, now we have taken the next logical step to give customers an additional choice by offering Business Mashups through SaaS. This is the main reason why we have set up the Mashup Exchange, a virtual community and marketplace for business people and their partners, to help them connect to the Mashup movement. For our partners, this launch of Mashup Exchange means that they will be able to publish and sell Packaged Mashup, they will have options to buy and deploy web services used to build Mashup and they will be able to use template workflows to speed Mashup creation in addition to professional service offerings.

We will also be selecting partners to build the movement further. We plan to invite the customers of such partners to micro markets that promote their organisation and offerings; encourage blogs, articles and other information to enable the Mashup Builder and create communities around software offerings and practice areas.