“Mashup actually is a term not invented by us, not even by the IT industry, if you will. It was originally first used in the media space. In the past people began to use different content and then mix them up. For example, in the music industry there are people who take the notes from different songs and mix them up and come out with some very interesting new music that way.
Later this same concept began to migrate onto the Web. In the first couple of years of this century, after 2000, this concept, once it was introduced onto the Web, people began to come up with many different combinations of content. For example RSS feeds can be considered as one basic type of mashup. People would combine the content from different sites, different sources of information, and come up with their own information portal, if you will.
For a more advanced mashup on the Web I often use the example how people plot different data over a map which becomes a very important application on the Web that will help people visualize what that data means in a geographic sense.
In our case what does this have to do with the BI space? We believe we are pioneers in terms of how to try to apply mashup in this space. This mostly comes from our experience observing what our customers were trying to do. We have been in the BI business for about 12 years now. We have seen a lot of different applications and usage.
One thing we found is that a lot of times users, customers of ours, are really struggling to get the data straight. What they are trying to do, actually, many times end up as some sort of very large project that requires them to go through a whole series of ETL processes, data warehousing, etc. That becomes a very resource intensive, as well as a slow process. Many times their requirements do not warrant that type of attention or investment or sometimes simply cannot be done because of resource constraints.” - Luke Liang, CEO |