The reason for much of the chatter about mashups and Service-Oriented Business Applications (SOBAs) arises from the fact that mashups, and Web 2.0 in general, are primarily social phenomena, while SOBAs, and SOA generally, are primarily business phenomena: the “B” in “SOBA” indicates their purpose is to deliver flexible IT resources to meet continually changing business needs. Does it make sense, then, to consider an enterprise mashup to be a rich, collaborative SOBA consumer environment? For a mashup to be an enterprise mashup in that it addresses a particular business problem, tight coupling between provider and consumer software would be a serious concern. Most of today’s mashups, however, care little about loose coupling. Mashups that meet business needs, therefore, will require SOA, and the SOA infrastructure necessary to guarantee loose coupling. Without that loose coupling, mashups are little more than toys from the enterprise perspective. Most important, however, SOBAs require governance. Clearly, no business would risk allowing any of its employees to assemble and reassemble business processes willy nilly, with no controls in place to ensure that the resulting SOBAs followed corporate policies. The problem is, today’s mashups are inherently ungoverned. The bottom line is, the more governed an enterprise mashup becomes, the less like a Web 2.0-style mashup it’ll be. In any case, the true promise of SOBAs depends upon user interfaces sophisticated enough for a broader business audience to use. Few such tools exist today, but the writing is on the wall: the enterprise mashup is the future of the SOBA consumer.

Jason Bloomberg is senior analyst and principal at service orientation and enterprise Web 2.0 advisory and analysis firm ZapThink LLC. He is a leading thought leader in the areas of enterprise architecture and service-oriented architecture, and helps organizations around the world better leverage their IT resources to meet changing business needs. He is a frequent speaker, prolific writer, and pundit. His latest book, Service Orient or Be Doomed! How Service Orientation Will Change Your Business (John Wiley & Sons, 2006, coauthored with Ron Schmelzer), is recognized as the leading business book on service orientation. Jason has a diverse background in eBusiness technology management and industry analysis, including serving as a senior analyst in IDC’s eBusiness Advisory group, as well as holding eBusiness management positions at USWeb/CKS (later marchFIRST) and WaveBend Solutions (now Hitachi Consulting). He also co-authored the books XML and Web Services Unleashed (SAMS Publishing, 2002), and Web Page Scripting Techniques (Hayden Books, 1996).

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Third International "Virtualization Conference & Expo" Call for Papers Now Open
Virtualization, the hottest subject in all IT right now, will be center stage in New York City - 23-24 June, 2008, at the next conference and expo in the SYS-CON Events' third international Virtualization Conference & Expo.

Key opinion-formers in the field of infrastructure and pioneers of virtualization technologies of all types have already begun submitting speaking proposals to Virtualization Conference & Expo 2008 East, being held in New York City, 23-24 June, 2008. Topics covered will range from Application Virtualization, Desktop Virtualization, Network Virtualization, Server Virtualization, and Storage Virtualization, to Virtual Machine Automation, Physical to Virtual (P2V) Migration, Management Applications, Tools and Utilities, and Virtualization Scripts and Procedures.

Submissions on these and dozens of other topics have already begun streaming in. The Call for Papers is as always a 100% online process, found here.

IDC has stated that the virtualization services market alone is going to reach $11.7 billion by 2011 and in general this technology, which has been around for a good number of years, seems suddenly to be on everyone's mind.

In short, Virtualization is fast becoming a key requirement for every server in the data center, enabling increased workloads in server consolidation projects, efficient software development and testing, resource management for dynamic data centers, application re-hosting and compatibility, and high-availability partitions.

Help with that transformation: submit your speaking proposal today.

Topics will include:

• Server Virtualization
  
• Desktop Virtualization
  
• File Virtualization
  
• The Future of the Virtual Enterprise
  
• Hosted Virtualization
  
• Para-virtualization
  
• Virtualization Hardware Support
  
• Hardware-level Virtualization
  
• Storage Virtualization
  
• Virtualization for Server Consolidation and Containment
  
• Windows Virtualization
  
• Utility Computing
  
• State of the Virtualization Services Market