Cash-strapped, newly budget-conscious banks may have less to spend, but their technology needs continue to grow unabated. To keep pace with their own and client demand for state-of-the-art services, many are turning to mashups — homemade hybrid applications that build on existing programs, yet offer something new.
“Mashup” is a music industry term that refers to a composition that combines samples of music from previously published songs. Especially popular in rap and hip hop, a mashup is created when a producer melds, say, the bass line from one song with the chorus of another and then adds a lyrical overlay, courtesy of a singer or rapper: Presto, a new, yet familiar, composition is born.
In the information technology world, a mashup is produced by pulling together information from multiple sources, including separate, stand-alone programs, to create a new application, according to David Schehr, research director of investment services at Gartner, an IT research firm headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut. This one-plus-one-equals-three-for-less-than-the-price-of-two mind-set allows people with limited technical expertise to create their own programs, with little or no involvement from IT professionals.
Rather than modifying an operating system such as those offered by Microsoft Corp. or the Open Group, maker of Unix, users can employ application programming interfaces to combine two or more applications. APIs are fast becoming an essential part of IT planning, notes Oren Michels, chief executive officer at Mashery, a San Francisco–based provider of API management services. “Where once you would dismiss any company that didn’t have an Internet strategy, now investors may short any firm without an API strategy,” he says.
Chambers of commerce and convention and visitors bureaus have enjoyed great success with mashups, using a local portion of a free, Web-based mapping program, such as Google Earth, and overlaying it with information of interest to travelers — locations of hotels, restaurants, tourist attractions and the like — to deliver data to users. For example, someone interested in finding restaurants within walking distance of his hotel need only visit the local tourist bureau’s Web site, enter the address of his hotel and click on an icon requesting information on local eateries. A map appears, indicating the restaurants within the proximity designated by the user.
Financial services firms are finding similar success with mashups. Omer Soykan, senior vice president of technology for investment banking at Jefferies Group, has created three mashups that combine internal client investment and transaction information with news, market research and modeling tools from Standard & Poor’s Capital IQ, on an Internet- and Excel-based platform. Such mashups allow an investment banker to tell quickly how news about a given company is affecting a client’s portfolio.
J.P. Morgan Securities developed a mashup to handle one of its most intricate and critical capital market functions: basket trading. The firm’s Trading Algorithm Optimizer, which is available to traders as well as institutional clients, brings together three critical components — analytics, algorithms and real-time optimization tools, all from internal sources — on a single screen via a Web interface; in the past users had to compare this data across six or seven screens. Traders and clients get the same look at trading activity in real time, so they can simultaneously monitor portfolio performance, allowing for immediate collaboration and consultation, notes Robert Kissell, the firm’s executive director of quantitative research.
Michael Ogrinz, principal architect for global markets at Charlotte, North Carolina–based Bank of America Corp., is so impressed with the potential of mashups that he has written a book on the subject. Mashup Patterns, which is due to be published in April, explains how these hybrids are being used to improve customer service and enhance employee productivity. “There is no other way to so quickly and simply create an application,” he says, especially with “all of this data hiding in plain sight on the Internet.”
Still, Ogrinz notes that allowing employees to create their own mashups can cause problems, especially if the external data they use proves to be inaccurate. “You run the risk of multiple employees unfamiliar with corporate rules and requirements creating and deploying solutions,” he says. Creating an in-house application “doesn’t mean a firm can sidestep legal and compliance issues.”
John Masser, founder of Seattle-based ProgrammableWeb.com, an online resource for mashups, agrees. “Doing mashups haphazardly strikes fear in IT, which has to deal with audits,” he says.
