Sparking Enterprise Mashups with Xignite

Xignite, which provides Web services to financial services providers, is branching out to enable mashups for its customers.

In an exclusive interview with eWEEK, Xignite CEO Stephane Dubois said the San Mateo, Calif., company has created the Splice Mashup Platform to enable programmers to build Web service mashups, or applications that pull data from several sources.

Splice enables programmers to take Web services from Xignites portfolio or integrate Web services from other providers, including StrikeIron, Amazon or SalesForce.com, to create customized Web services.

The platform, scheduled to launch in November, was conceived after Xignites customers expressed a desire for a way to call up multiple Web services at once, instead of each one separately, to complete a task.

While mashup application tools like IBMs QEDWiki are designed to let users with little technical know-how slap together useful applications, Splice is targeted at developers who need to build reusable application building blocks.

Read more here about StrikeIron employing QEDWiki for Web services.

The product is aimed at software developers, but Dubois said it will make it easier for programmers to drag and drop multiple Web services into one assembly to derive better business value from them.

"You always hear the same story: Im going to take an address and Google Maps and mash those up into an application. But to go beyond that and start building true business value applications, application mashup platforms require a lot of coding because the Web services are pretty elementary," Dubois told eWEEK.

Dubois provided an example of how Splice might be used for a new account in a financial service company.

Programmers could enter a name and e-mail address with tools from Web service provider StrikeIron, confirm if the lead is listed on the SDN (Specially Designed Nationals) list for U.S. OFAC Compliance with Xignites OFAC tool and then use Xignites Fundamentals service to fill in such data as Web site destination, number of employees and executives, and revenue.

Finally, the programmer can enter the complete account information into Salesforce.com Wealth Management edition application, or drag and drop it into a spreadsheet file or a mashup tool, such as QEDWiki.

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Gartner analyst Anthony Bradley, who delivered a presentation on enterprise mashups at the Gartner Web Innovation Summit in Las Vegas in September, said Xignites Mashup Platform also opens the door for another market dynamic because third-party developers write new services on top of the core services and sell them as a middleman to users.

Click here to read more about enterprise mashups burbling in the mainstream.

Bradley said this practice will enable the Mashup Platform to drive more scale and revenues for Xignites 50 core Web services. From there, he expects users may mix in some external services, possibly even incorporating some retail data sets with the financial data.

He said no other vendors currently offer a mashup enablement platform such as Xignite is proposing. However, he also said some vendors are working on something similar to Xignite, but that they are too early in their strategy to discuss them.

To that end, Bradley expects larger high-tech companies with a hand in software development, such as IBM, to look to acquire business mashup enablers such as Xignite, Kapow or Denodo.

"Everybodys got their own little spin, and when we see what emerges from them, there will be a lot of consolidation," he said.

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