Last week I caught up with Kyle Arteaga, VP, Corporate Communications at Serena Software. I have written about their efforts several times on the Fast Forward blog. Most recently, I covered an effort to make mashups more accessible, Serena Releases Free Pre-Packaged Mashups for Common Business Processes. This is my first Serena related post on AppGap and it covers two new additional efforts to make mashups more accessible.

First, Capgemini and Serena will offer clients a free boot camp with training on how to use mashups to address their everyday business problems like mashing together data and processes from Salesforce.com and SAP. Capgemini refers to this program as RAIN (short for RApid INnovation). Through this program, Capgemini’s RAIN engagement team will offer a one day training session to be conducted in Cupertino, Calif. to its clients, helping them take advantage of mashups and enterprise 2.0 to solve specific business issues using Serena’s Business Mashup tools. Andy Mulholland, the CTO of Capgemini is co-author of Mashup Corporations: The End of Business As Usual. He was recently quoted, “Companies need to become faster and more responsive to changes in the marketplace. This shift will only happen if the organization from the ground up adopts rapid innovation approaches and Web 2.0 technologies.” I can agree with this.

RAIN business analysts will then take the education process a further by creating a mashup for their client that addresses a specific problem for their enterprise. They then leave the new application for free, following the Lay’s potato model, “You can’t just have one.” I think this is a smart investment, as Capgemini will learn an extensive amount of information about the client while demonstrating the power of mashups. Both of these factors will make them a more valuable business partner for further work.

In their second move, Serena is launching a public Mashup Exchange where companies can buy and sell mashups. Using HiveLive technology in the Mashup Exchange, Serena will also able to create private MicroExchanges™ for companies as well where they can swap mashups with colleagues. For example, IT can help business users by publishing Mashup-enabled access to an internal SAP system in a secured, private MicroExchange. Companies can then choose to make their mashups available on the public exchange. Unlike some exchanges, Serena offers this platform to third party developers at no cost, allowing many niche providers entrance to a larger marketplace.

I found it interesting that Serena has found that some companies start their internal mashup exchanges at the division level. This allows for pilots with division specific data and more control over the process. In some cases, the mashup may stay at the division level to avoid irrelevant data or data that has a different vetting process. This will especially appeal to the many large enterprises have multiple CIOs. In other cases, the mashups may go enterprise wide once it is tested and refined at the division level. The flexibility is very useful here. In one example, a European military purchasing group has created mashups across their supply chain to help with the bidding process. At the same time they developed other mashups for internal use of sensitive information.

The guiding principle in the Mashup Exchange is similar to their Mashup Composer, where companies can use a visual design tool to build and test mashups without coding at no charge. They also made a set of pre-packaged mashups available for free beginning in Q4 07. Serena wants to lower the barrier to mashups use and provide a preferred platform for innovation in enterprise 2.0.