Dion Hinchcliffe

Dion Hinchcliffe is an expert in information technology, business strategy, and next-generation enterprises. He is currently VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research as well as Chief Strategy Officer at 7Summits. A veteran of enterprise IT, Dion has been working for two decades with leading-edge methods to bridge the widening gap between business and technology. He has extensive practical experience with enterprise technologies and he consults, advises, and writes prolifically on social business, IT, and enterprise architecture. Dion still works in the trenches with clients in the Fortune 1000, government, and Internet startup community. He is also a sought-after keynote speaker and is co-author of several books on 2.0 subjects including Web 2.0 Architectures from O'Reilly as well as the best-selling Social Business By Design from John Wiley & Sons (May, 2012.)

Latest Posts

A bumper crop of new mashup platforms

A bumper crop of new mashup platforms

While application developers tend to roll their eyes at the concept of end-user mashups, they remain one of the more promising new trends in software development this year. And while it's certainly true it's early days yet for mashups, the tools that enable them remaining rather limited, seems to be changing as I regularly come across compelling new mashup platforms as well as upgrades to existing ones that show what will be possible soon. And for now, as evidenced recently in the McKinsey Web 2.0 in business survey where 21% of organizations globally said they are using or planning to use mashups, there appears to be considerable demand for mashups at the enterprise level even though the majority of existing offerings are primarily aimed at the consumer space. Is this disconnect resolving with the current crop of offerings? Let's take a look.

Mashups: The next major new software development model?

Mashups: The next major new software development model?

At last week's Mashup Ecosystem Summit held in San Francisco and sponsored by IBM with an invited assemblage of leading players in this space, I gave an opening talk about the current challenges and opportunities of mashups. And there I posed the title of this post as a statement instead of a question. The reason that it's a question here is entirely driven by the context of who is currently creating the majority of mashups these days. Because even a cursory examination of what people are doing every day on the Web right now tells us that mashups -- also known as ad hoc Web sites created on the fly out of other Web sites -- are indeed happening in a large way, albeit in simple forms, by the tens of thousands online every day.