Recently I spoke with René Bonvanie, the SVP of worldwide marketing, partner programs and online services at Serena Software. René recently joined Serena from Salesforce.com to help with the launch of their enterprise mashup solution. Serena has been providing application lifecycle management software for some time. They are now entering the Enterprise 2.0 and SaaS space with a recently announced mashup suite to meet a growing need. I have felt for a while that mashups might be the Enterprise 2.0 tool with the greatest impact in the long run so I applaud their direction.

As René pointed out, there is an increasing backlog of IT projects in most enterprises. The vast majority of IT budgets are chewed up by infrastructure to get the current applications going. René spoke about the neglected long tail of simple applications left in the queue to the increasing frustration of the business side. When IT groups have any breathing room they go for the big complex projects, as they should. But business users have many requests for simple applications to increase the efficiency and effectives of business processes. These requests are increasing as those on the business side see the cool Web 2.0 advances in their personal lives. They want the same innovations at their work and they are already starting to bring these tools to work (for example, see WSJ on An Office Winner: Consumer Tech).

Mashups offer a potential answer if they are made business-user friendly to use. That is what Serena has done. They have created the Serena Mashup Composer to enable the design, development and testing of mashups to support business process. They have developed a GUI interface that is similar to Office 2007 to target the business user who has the skills of an MS Office power user. It allows for the development of applications to support work process without programming. It is designed to free the IT department of the backlog of simple applications they cannot support and empower the business users to roll their own. I watched René demo the creation of a sample application and it seemed like the task that even I could do, the acid test for ease of use and the absence of IT skill requirements.

How does it work? René first provided a consumer example. Facebook, my favorite networking application, has open APIs. So third party developers can create applications without involving the IT people at Facebook. One example is the best friends application used by 12 million people, enhancing the appeal of Facebook without requiring any investment on their part. There have been close to 4,000 mashups developed for Facebook with no expense on their part.

The same thing can happen in the enterprise as application providers such as SAP and PeopleSoft have now provided open APIs. So a process approval mashup can take data from applications inside the firewall such as SAP (on the process) and PeopleSoft (on the approvers). You can even add data from hosted applications such as Salesfoce.com in a secure manner.

Serena is also changing their business model to reflect the new world. They have been proving software for purchase and implementation for years. Now they are offering on-demand services. But they have gone further. You can use the Serena Mashup Composer for free. You can design, develop and test your mashups without paying anything. Then they offer the Serena Mashup Server to provide the on-demand service to run these applications and here is where they make their money. You only pay when you have what you want and are ready to use it.

Serena then takes this new business model another step further. They are planning to provide the Serena Mashup Exchange in February 2008 so firms can share mashups and benefit from each other's development. The initial version will be open on the Web for anyone to use. They also plan to offer private versions for mashup exchanges behind the firewall for organizations that prefer to operate this way. It is nice to see traditional enterprise providers understanding the new Web, how it can help the enterprise, the new business models it suggests. It will be interesting to see where this goes will provide some examples of Serena mashups in my next post.