Jan 04
Alec Saunders just recounted a conversation he had a few days ago with a common past-boss, where he asked what the big deal about mashups was. Alec was right on the money when he said that they gave the promise of lower development costs with higher quality. It doesn’t stop there…
- Mashups are incremental. You very rarely need to rip out what you already have to use a mashup. In the world of voice, this is really excellent news, as capital equipment costs are considerable. Companies like LignUp and Iperia make excellent platforms to extend existing PBX functionality; Jaduka and Lypp do this with web services.
- Mashups use a Web architecture, and are naturally scalable and reliable. Common approaches today that leverage PSTN technologies are naturally unscalable and unreliable.
- Mashups, by virtue of being built upon web services architectures, allow disparate companies to integrate together in low cost and controlled ways. This is true in both the technical and the business sense. You might be familiar in service oriented APIs from Google and StrikeIron that allow you to use their networks to provide data or to get something done. You might also be familiar with Amazon’s or Ebay’s affiliate models that allow them to have massively large partnership channels.
- Mashups use technologies such as PHP, HTML, Flex and Ruby which are well known to millions of web developers.
- Mashup projects tend to be small, and are therefore less risky, than other development approaches. When you can simply cut and paste a HTML snippet to allow web callbacks from your intranet, company web site or e-mail – you know the project is small.
That’s why we favor mashups as the technical approach to communications enhanced business process improvement, and for businesses, that’s a big deal.
