Here come 'enterprise mashup services'

IBM's Bob Zureck picked up on my recent 'Mashups as a Service' (MaaS) musings and suggests another way to put it -- Enterprise Mashup Services, or EMS. I like it.

Within the EMS sphere, Zureck writes, "companies will combine information from enterprise search engines, web services, messaging systems, business intelligence engines and data integration solutions and combine that information from external services from their partners and emerging external data sources to deliver the information up to the glass."

In a new post, our newest member to the ZDNet blogosphere, Dion Hinchcliffe, talks about the growing 'mashosphere,' noting that "the open Web services and SOAs that most of us are now building are also really helping make this possible by lowering the impedance between our systems.... being able to readily combine all our services into rich new applications will probably herald the long-awaited arrival of true software reuse (beyond the ever ubiquitous cut-and-paste method that is)."

Zureck also brings in enterprise information management as a key enabler of EMS: "Data Quality solutions will be a key part of an Enterprise Mashup Service to ensure that key information will be delivered clean and standardize. This will be especially important for customer relationship management systems that are taken advantage of in an EMS."

Here's a working example I have recently observed that supports the EMS/MaaS proposition. StrikeIron recently struck an agreement with CRMfusion which provides tools to help administer Salesforce.com environments. In the deal, CRMfusion added an address-verification Web service that is accessed through StrikeIron's Web Services Network. StrikeIron maintains the address-verification service, which is updated on a monthly basis from the United States Postal Service and Canada Post. Salesforce.com end-users access this tool through CRMfusion to scrub their contact list data.

Mashups at work, SOA style.