Mashups are viewed by some as the potential poster child of enterprise 2.0. They feed off the open architecture of the new Web to make data more visible in more efficient ways. Mashups put application development in the hands of the business users to craft stuff that they need in ways that are useful to them. I recently spoke with John Crupi, CTO, at Jackbe, one of the well known providers in this space. He updated me on their offerings and plans.

Jackbe was started over five years ago as an AJAX company developing browser based applications for the financial services market. John was at Sun working in the SOA space and saw increasing opportunities emerging. He wanted to update the Powerbuilder model where IT facilitated application development by business units. He brought a team to Jackbe with this goal in mind. John saw mashups coming out of the consumer market and they matched his vision for integrating enterprise data.

Presto, their enterprise mashup platform was released last year. It provides users and developers the ability to consume, create, customize and share dynamically created mashups created from internal services, external services, and application databases. This is done in a secure and governed manner. Using standards-based interfaces like WSRP and GIF, JackBe has also created bi-directional connectors from Presto to standards-compliant enterprise applications including HP SOA Systinet and Oracle WebCenter Portal.

Jackbe is now planning to soon release Presto 2.0 incorporating what they learned from customers and industry over the past year. It will include “mashlets” which John described as out of the box enterprise mashup widgets with focused user interfaces for specific data types such as grids, charts and graphs. Mashup creators can select from these widgets as they develop new mashups. These mashlets will work with multiple interfaces such as Netvibes, Google Gadgets, BEA and Oracle portals as the mashlets are not tied to a destination but create a wrapper on the fly to fit their outlet. Jackbe is also supporting multiple platforms with this new release such as iPhones, as well as laptops. In addition, they have developed an Excel plug-in that allows a user to import mashup data into Excel, do manipulations, and then put it back into the served based mashup for others to see the transformed data without having to get the Excel data through email. These all seem to be useful upgrades that will make it easier to develop and use enterprise mashups.

Currently, a US defense agency is using Presto to develop mashups that consolidate data from multiple sources around events of interest. A biometrics firm is using Presto to integrate analytics from internal and external sources in more efficient ways. Jackbe also provides the Enterprise 2.0 blog to offer information on the broader enterprise mashup marketspace and related enterprise 2.0 technologies.