Mashup Corporations: The End of Business as Usual

by Andy Mulholland, C.S. Thomas, C. S. Thomas

Book Overview

Mashup Corporations: The End of Business As Usual tells the tale of Vorpal Inc., a company that pioneers the implementation of service-oriented architecture to transform its business model. CEO Jane Moneymaker believes in marketing manager Hugo Wunderkind's idea of creating a new market using non-traditional methods based on mashups, but struggles to achieve this vision. The story illustrates what it takes to achieve cultural change, overturning established...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0978921828
• ISBN13: 9780978921828
• Release Date: April 2007
• Publisher: Evolved Technologist
• Length: 196 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Book in good condition

Trying to read and understand the concepts. Not a business person or a marketing person, so it's a puzzle to me for now.

SOA, philosophically

When did you last smile, nay laugh when reading a "technology" book. ? This book is the SOA fairy tale. It doesn't preach to you. It doesn't deep dive into technology. It tells you a story... but careful, you won't be able to put it down. This isn't the book to go to sleep with. I think it was Confucious that said something like it takes a lot of hard work to render something simple. The authors have enough industry and technological background to render SOA most easily understood by telling a story, and this one should, in my view, be a bestseller. Perfect for novices to see why SOA WILL and IS happening to us, it is helpful to all, architects, developers, CIOs, line of business managers, since the story is so well told. Even SOA experts will find nuggets that are of great value in spreading the SOA gospel. Its descriptive style explioting a fictious (but highly realistic) company use case, walks you gently through the essence of change that SOA implies. Change to IT Infrastructure, change in collaboration principles, change in role and job descriptions, business and IT alignment, it leaves few stones untouched. Most of all is uses this fictitious company's SOA transformation to help the reader to learn just why SOA governance is the imperative that the Gartner group claims it to be, and what lifecycle management means, practically. The best things are often are simple. This book is an easy read, entertaining and a thoroughly excellent way for all parties, regardless of their role, to profit from clever, clear and simple rendering of this sometimes nebulous domain we know as SOA. Great thanks are due to the authors for their initiative and skilled efforts, I wish more subjects could be so easily portrayed. Read it soon!

Mashups must be the way of the future.

This is a great little book. In the setting of a fictional company, Mulholland et.al. use storytelling to make the wonders of Web2.0, Web Services and Business Mashups accessible. General managers who wonder and worry about the mysteries of IT and what to make of these 'cool' new terms coming out of Silicon Valley and elsewhere, would do well to read this over and think about how it will apply to their companies, their customers and their markets. There is such a thing as the 'long tail' of applications development (to borrow from Chris Anderson's Long Tail book). IT shops wrestle with how to execute on the big hairy projects, like a new ERP system or a new CRM system...rightly so. They fret over how to satisfy their business users and customers with all the less complex but voluminous requests they get....and fret even more of the truth which is that more and more of these business users are tech savvy and capable of writing their own applications. Mashup Corporations points out that these business users should be empowered by IT and the CEO, not discouraged. Nice job.

Service Oriented Business Change Explained

I like this little book because it uses a simple very real example from the idea to the quickly hacked proof of concept to the integration of that new business process into the whole enterprise business system. You read it and realize that oh wow, this kind of things are already happening in our organization and it will only get bigger. If you want to continue to be successful you have to service orient your enterprise organization too. It is crystalizing what Enterprise SOA is all about and why this is urgent. If I were tasked to implement a service oriented architecture at a client or want to get my company being more agile, I would give out this book to everyone involved.

SOA for the layman...

As a technologist I'm often left trying to explain to non-technology centric business folks why SOA is important to them and how it will impact their business. This book is a quick read and does the job very well!