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One oft-debated SOA topic is how to show that it can deliver real business value.

Claims abound of intangible business benefits such as ‘business agility’, but it can be hard to find real examples where SOA delivers clear business value.

So I was pleased to see the recent BusinessWeek article on ‘mashups’. The idea of mashups came from a desire to have a customized web experience, where different sources of internet pages are blended or ‘mashed’ together, such as combining Google Maps and real-estate listings. However, companies are realizing that mashups can offer real business benefits too. BusinessWeek writes

Now, some leading-edge companies such as E*Trade and Siemens are experimenting with the technology to more easily customize their corporate applications and help boost employee productivity. Enterprise mashups … typically integrate internal company data and software with external services. For instance, E*Trade combined its internally developed customer relationship management system with Salesforce.com to give the sales team access to some new features.

This technique for delivering higher value services and solutions by mashing up existing ones seems to fall smack bang in the area of SOA. By using an SOA approach, business services are created that can now be mashed up pretty easily, since SOA makes them easy to invoke through a standard interface. Enterprise mashups may be one of the much sought-after ‘killer apps’ for SOA, although this may be rather overstating its appeal. However, there is no doubt that mashups offer innovative businesses a new avenue to create value – the key is that SOA makes it possible for these initiatives to be put in place quickly, easily and with little technical effort required (hopefully!).

Steve