Two RedMonk clients, MindTouch and SnapLogic, released a mashup, or composite application if you like, narrowed down to CRM systems, SalesForce and SugarCRM to be exact. Check out a screencast here. The idea of such a compositing platform reached an apex of hype last year and earlier this year if you’ll recall.

Taking the non-technological explanation and settling it in a work context, the idea is that all the applications you use for your job can’t hope to put together your Ultimate User Interface Dashboard Hoopty. More important – and pulling from, of all places, Citrix vision – the traditional round of “portals” out there that were to solve this problem seemed to have fallen with a wet thump.

Dark Data

Key to mashups for business, though, is getting access to the “dark data” that’s obscured in boring and difficult to get to data sources behind the firewall. While we’ve gone leaps and bounds to make data and process access easier in the business software world, I’d theorize that the majority of business data and enterprise process out there is locked behind difficult and tedious interfaces.

Yes, I know we all have already learned ABAP, but I couldn’t have written all that AJAX and drag and drop stuff in ABAP in the 2 days it took me to build the [Ruby on Rails] application. –Dan McWeeney

As a more consumery example, think of how boring geo-data was before Google and others finally put a dead-simple, fun even, UI on-top of it. Better, their programatic interfaces were there and easier to use than obtuse protocols. No one even uses the word “protocol” anymore.

Lighting Dark Data

The operative theory behind things like Deki CRM, then, is to light up that dark data. SnapLogic adaptors hope to make accessing that data easier and possible, and the Deki wiki hopes to provide and UI that finally lets users assemble that now lit data into something usable. And, even more contemporary, the idea is to this mashing up across the firewall, pulling and pushing data from cloud-bound services like SalesForce.

What I find interesting here is the focus of the packaging. It’s always tempting for a vendor to go out there and target everything – as both MindTouch and SnapLogic have done in the past – but narrowing down to something as specific as just SalesForce and SugarCRM can give a vendor the focus needed to explain just what a mashup is and then, if that works, pull customers and users through the thought exercise of generalizing that compositing across other data and process silos.

As a sort of undiscovered example from the IT Management world, check out generationE’s wiki-driven runbook. They don’t have a lot of information online, but they’re an interesting example having a go at applying mashups to systems administration and automation.

Disclosure: MindTouch and SnapLogic are clients.

Last week we talked with MindTouch‘s Aaron Fulkerson about the new release of their Deki product, née DekiWiki. While Deki started out as an enterprise-ready wiki, Deki has evolved into more of a quick and easy business application development platform with linage in “mashups” and “composite applications.”

This new release – Kilen Woods (named after a Minnesota park)- adds in a workflow engine and many more adaptors to pull data into Deki from other sources.

What’s it for?

Good enough, lightweight apps, but don’t build a transactional app with it. This is for self- managed applications. If you think you need IT to manage it, you may need something else [such as a full blown Portal implementation].
–IBM’s Larry Bowden on IBM’s Mashup Center

What do people use something like Deki for? In short, it’s a wrap-up of middle-ware, “platform,” or “runtime” aimed at helping you create web sites and custom made applications in those web sites. Deki doesn’t so much provide the core functional components that’d be in these applications so much as provide the space for several different applications to integrate together into one view. (That said, it does include the “applications” of a wiki and document management.)

The “applications” here are not advanced applications that you might consider stand-alone software. Instead, they’re primarily focused on custom built “workflows” that skew heavy towards presenting data and managing documents.

Indeed, as outlined by MindTouch several places (including this good interview from Bungee Labs), MindTouch’s intent is to provide everything: they just want to provide the connective glue that pulls best-of-breed, stand-alone applications and services together into one, integrated view.

So, for example, if you have to use 8 different web applications and services to get your daily job done, MindTouch is hoping that a layer of Deki can help meld those into one, unified feeling application you deal with (or, less than 8, at least).

The end goal is to wrap just enough process and workflow around raw data from multiple sources to get something useful.

As mentioned above, this is what you’d call a “composite application” or “mashup server.” That’s still a weird floorwax/dessert topping category that takes imagination and effort to apply to specific use cases. This doesn’t mean the software is bad: rather that it can be difficult to map it to customers waiting to pay someone to fix their problems. This is a classic middle-ware problem, esp. for new types of middle-ware that aren’t yet part of the canonical IT stack like, say, databases are.

You can compare the goals of usage to things like IBM’s QEDWiki, Quickr, or MashUp Center quoted about above. You can see also see how platforms like drupal can jimmy themselves into the same attention-space.

Deki’ed Out

Doing the quick diff, Aaron told us that the primary new stuffs are the addition of workflow management and several new adaptors for integrating 3rd party data into Deki. Those adaptors include: Salesforce, SugarCRM, Microsoft SQLServer, MySQL, Microsoft Access, Mantis, Trac, Bugzilla, SVN, and Atlassian Jira.

By “workflow” they mean providing the basic framework that allows multiple people to work on some data item, be it a chart, a request, etc. Combined with the adaptors, the idea is to wrap some mediated process around pulling data into the system and then doing something with it – beyond cut-n-paste, I guess.

Included, of course are the old document management features you’d expect, like centralizing the storage of documents with version control so you don’t email things around.

The other, over-riding principal of Deki compared to traditional content middleware platforms is a focus on being open and simple. Deki is built in a very web-native feeling way, trying to keep APIs and data as open and accessible as possible, pulling towards transparency in those processes, if not, human-understandability. This contrasts to systems that require binary protocols and APIs or overly complex Web Services schemes. That is, Deki has a REST-y feel to it rather than a WS-* feel.

While Deki is open source (GPLv2), there are “Enterprise” and managed hosted pricing plans for support and additional goodies. Check out the pricing here.

Disclaimer: IBM is a client, as are Microsoft and Atlassian.