Anthony Bradley

JackBe, a leading boutique vendor of enterprise mashup technologies recently announced a new $5 million round of funding.

Mashable.com had a good article titled “RockYou Spits in Recession’s Face, Secures $17 Million in Funding” that covers some 2008 investment in public Web based mashup companies.

I expected 2008 to be the year of the enterprise mashup. Early in the year it looked like I would be right but enterprise mashups have not escaped the economic slowdown. Mashups are still exploding on the Web. TechCrunch listed some numbers in their article “Pageflakes Acquisition Confirmed.”  Additionally, mashup vendors report to me that their sales are still growing (though not at the exponential rate they had hoped). Earlier in the year, Gartner’s annual SOA survey (which had some mashup questions in it) had about 12% of respondents working with mashups and another 15% planning to do so in 2009. Of course, these numbers have likely changed.

The mashup investments, web growth, and vendor sales (as reported by them) all indicate that enterprise mashups will live on. Although the explosive growth has curtailed, mashups may be one of the areas of innovation that continues to do well through the economic downturn. This makes sense as organizations looking to save dollars may look to mashups for a quicker and cheaper approach to integration and new app development. Vendors are already morphing their marketing messages around “Mashups for Cost Savings.”