My name is Ross Dargahi and I'm a Co-Founder and VicePresident of Engineering at Zimbra. Today I'm going to talk to you aboutenterprise mashups. The consumer space has certainly led the mashup craze buttraditionally information has been in silos. We've had maps, for examples andpackage tracking and, for example, traffic information.
And the user has typically interacted with these in a silofashion such that they've had their browser and they've connected to traffic toget traffic information then had to go to a map site to get map information.And then finally if they wanted to track their Fed Ex package, they go to FedEx and track the package.
With the advent of services oriented architecture, or SOA,and the use of Ajax we now can get a lot more compelling experience for theconsumer. We can essentially aggregate information in interesting ways. Forexample, we've seen Google Maps plus Fed Ex enabling me to track a package asit makes its way across the country to my front door. Yahoo Maps plus Trafficallows me to map my directions and then see how long it's going to take me to getthere.
Yahoo's gone even further and they've added businessservices that allow me not only to map directions and see how long it's goingto take me to get there but also find out the Starbucks along the way. Theseare pretty cool, compelling, and a lot of fun to use.
But let's take a look in the enterprise. Much the same asinformation has been silo-ed in the consumer space, we seen the same inenterprise. In the enterprise we have customer relation management systems, wehave enterprise resource planning systems, we have of course the everubiquitous e-mail and we have calendaring systems, just as a few examples.
And again, these have been typically very silo-ed so theuser would use either a native desktop application or a web application usingthe browser to access these various systems. So, for example, to approve a POthe user would connect to the PO system, pull up the PO, approve or reject it.The same with e-mail, it would load my e-mail application and interact with themessaging system.
Again, if we go and provide service oriented architecture ontop of these information repositories, we can do some very interesting things.Let me give you an example. Imagine I receive an e-mail from an employee and inthat e-mail there's a PO number. And imagine that the employee is asking me toapprove that PO. He's saying Ross, this is an urgent PO, we've got to get thesewidgets into the company right away so we can ship them out to a customer.
Now, traditionally what I would have to do is be connectedto my e-mail application. Then I would have to switch to the PO system, log in,search for the PO, read it, approve it, switch back to the e-mail applicationand respond to my employee saying that I've approved or rejected the PO.However, with the power of SOA and Ajax what I can do is hover over the POnumber in the mail application and perhaps get a bubble, which has adescription and the dollar amount. And right in place I might have an approvalor a rejection button.
So from within the context of my mail application I canapprove or reject the PO and respond directly to the employee. That's reallypowerful. That's really compelling and it really enhances my productivity. Andthat is the power of the enterprise mashup.
