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Reduce Operating Costs Leveraging Mash-ups – Part 1 the Challenge

I was flying yesterday to visit our development team in Dallas and I was thinking about how to reduce IT and operating costs using these new mash-up web 2.0 technologies. For those who don't know me – I tend to think a lot about reducing costs and business models, so I approach technologies from a cost reduction or simplifying a business model perspective. Cool technologies are great, but if they do not help reduce costs, improve the quality of our daily lives or improve our business model – what's the point. Over the next couple of weeks, I'm going to try to answer the question "How to reduce operating costs leveraging Web 2.0 technologies?" . If you have thoughts or articles that you think would help answer this question – join in. The goal is to take a real life data center example look at their costs and see how those costs could be reduced leveraging Web 2.0 Mash-ups…..Stay tuned.

Mash Ups

Grabbing a cup of coffee a buddy of mine asked what is a web 2.0 Mash – Up.   I explained to him what I thought it was which was essentially creating a new application by putting together other applications – he looked puzzled and I think even I was a little puzzled as to how to best explain this to him – so I went in search of a better definition and example of a Web 2.0 Mash-Up – I learned a lot so I decided to share with you what I learned…..

A Mash Up is a web application that uses data sources for different applications to create a new application.  An example of that would be Google Maps integrating real estate information, thus creating a new application that was not originally architected by Google or the real estate company.  Ok there has to be other examples, let me dig some more:

So here is a cool link of Mash – ups.  http://www.mashups.com/software.htm 

I looked through this and while the mash-ups are cool and fun, my CFO experience said there has to be some more practical examples of mash-ups that help solve real world problems.   So my search continues ….

Ok back, after searching further I came across a pretty good article on practical mash-up business models  http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mashup_business.php .  Let me know what you think.   Talk to you later…