The movement to empowering business users via Enterprise Mashups, which began to gather momentum in 2006 and 2007, has now gathered speed to the extent that at the upcoming AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2008 East in New York City in mid-March, there is a dedicated track showcasing the industry's leaders in Enterprise Mashups and related Enterprise 2.0 and Enterprise Web 2.0 initiatives - all aimed at letting users join in data from outside the enterprise.

Companies like IBM have been paving the way for business collaboration tools and Enterprise Mashups for years.

In a session by IBM's Jon Ferraiola and Sumeer Bhola, the concept of Secure Mashups will be introduced. "We will describe current work at OpenAjax Alliance on OpenAjax Hub 1.1 and secure mashups," Ferrraiola explains.

"Mashups have the potential for revolutionizing the way web applications are developed, but there are security risks," he continues. "In order to unleash the industry, OpenAjax Alliance is adding secure mashup features to its OpenAjax Hub 1.1 release. This new release will include a set of techniques called 'SMash' that were originally developed by IBM Research and allows for secure mashups that run in today's browsers."

In another AJAXWorld session entitled "The Performance Paradigm of a Mashed Up World," the Chief Strategy Officer of Webmetrics, Peter Kirwan, intends to explain how the enterprise Web ecosystem is becoming increasingly complex, comprised of multiple disparate partner sites, data sources and Web services – all of which make up the new mashup world.

"And while the method of delivering enterprise applications may be changing, the users expectations for quality, dependability, and uptime have not," Kirwan notes. In his presentation, he will define the performance paradigm facing enterprise mashups, while answering the following questions:

• How does an enterprise validate a positive user experience when they don’t control all the pieces in the service delivery chain?
• If there are problems somewhere in the chain, how are performance issues isolated and diagnosed?
• What are the important data points that should be monitored and how can that data be shared and best utilized across a web ecosystem?
  

Another company active in the Enterprise Mashups space is DreamFace Interactive, this time from a UI perspective. Olivier Poupeney, co-founder and CEO, will be giving a session entitled "Sharable Enterprise Mashups: The New User-Driven Composite Apps" in which he will show how personal Web use has led to a rapid increase in user sophistication which is naturally reaching the Enterprise.

"A new mode of information visualization known as a Mashup combined with the collaborative aspects of Web 2.0 is finding success where Composite Applications struggled: cost, speed of development and interactivity," Poupenay says. He adds:

Ian Tomlin, another speaker on the Enterprise Mashups track, intends to how how some of the world's largest companies are already exploiting code-free composite applications to solve their business priorities. His session, "Code Free Composites - Where SOA and Mashups Converge," will show that hifgh performance people within organizations need no programming skills, scripting skills, database skills - any IT skills - to gather the data they need and to build data marts and online portal applications.