I just reread my editorial introduction to the February 2007 issue of CBR (Vol. 7, No. 2) on Web 2.0 -- sounded pretty melancholic. It is indeed hard to believe that those days of napkin-at-a-coffee-shop business model innovation were more than a decade ago! The good news, as I stated in the February 2007 issue, is that the excitement and feeling of possibilities that pervaded the early days of the Web are now back in the form of Web 2.0.

While the recession (if we are allowed to call it that) may put a damper on such feelings, I think that the notion that IT departments are instrumental to innovation -- process, product, and service innovation -- is now established. Couple this idea with the realization that innovation for many modern organizations in the developed world is critical to sustained differentiation and survival, and I believe that potentially shrinking budgets will not equate a defensive approach at many organizations. Stay tuned for our yearly issue on budgeting later this year for an in-depth analysis of the effects of the economic slowdown on IT departments in the US and around the world.

Web 2.0 has in many ways reignited a trend toward an increasingly proactive role of IT professionals in innovation. Web 2.0 has recently provided the catalyst, the facade, and the energy behind this trend. As you may recall from the February 2007 issue of CBR, Web 2.0 is much more than a set of technology advances and social trends. In my opinion, Web 2.0 is a mindset. Web 2.0 is about two-way communication, collaboration, and agility. But Web 2.0 is the visible portion of the iceberg; underneath there is a set of technologies and methodologies that enable it.

If Web 2.0 is about collaboration and agility, perhaps no other enabler is as important as mashups -- in their various declinations. Our contributors do a great job in defining mashups, in differentiating them from other approaches to business and data integration, and in categorizing the various types of mashups. For the time being, it suffices to say that our focus in this issue of CBR is on enterprise mashups and how they are being used today in organizations. Our focus is less on the consumer-focused mashups based on Flickr or Google Maps APIs that are visible in sites such as Epic Trip or MothersClick (forgive the shameless plug for former students who founded the two companies!).

In order to benchmark the state of the art in enterprise mashups and to provide tangible guidelines to those of you who are implementing them, or thinking of doing so, we deployed our monthly blend of academic and practicing talents. Our first contribution is provided by Charalampos Patrikakis, Athanasios Voulodimos, and George Taskasaplidis. Charalampos received is PhD in engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), and he now conducts his research on IP services, P2P networking, personal networks, mobile computing, and context-aware services at the Tele-communications Laboratory of the NTUA. Athanasios is a research associate in the Telecommunications Laboratory of NTUA and is currently working in the field of computer networks research in national and European projects. George is a member of the technical staff at the Technological Educational Institution of Western Macedonia where his research focuses on Web 2.0 technologies. Our second contribution is provided by Stefan Andreasen, CTO of Kapow Technologies. In his role at Kapow, he has helped more than 300 enterprises of all sizes to leverage mashup technologies to speed business and IT innovation.

Charalampos, Athanasios, and George provide us with a historical contextualization of mashups by couching their definition in the trends toward ever-growing data and information, ever more disparate systems, and the increasing realization of the power of information and the need for uniform display and access that have brought it about. They then provide an interesting and very valuable overview of the obstacles that mashups encounter in making the leap from a Web 2.0 tool to an enterprise-worthy technology. With this solid background as the starting point Charalampos, Athanasios, and George evaluate the survey results.

Stefan, after providing operational definitions of mashups and a very useful categorization, addresses the key benefits of mashups and identifies the typical obstacles slowing down their adoption. He then does a great job of systematically addressing and commenting on the survey findings.

If the survey results are any indication, the growing area of mashups is still characterized by significant confusion as to what are the distinctive characteristics of mashups. Moreover, almost half of the respondents have yet to deploy this emerging technology. Yet, the plethora of information surrounding us today and the unabated flow of new data generated by an ever-increasing number of transaction processing systems, coupled with the lack of uniformity of storage and information representation tools, makes an almost self-evident case for the need for agile integration technologies that will help the enterprise survive, and take advantage of, the deluge. Mashups are one candidate gaining increasing attention. It is therefore a perfect time for us to produce an issue on this topic to provide you, our readers, with the conceptual framework, the vocabulary, and an overview of the issues surrounding this emerging approach to enterprise business and data integration.