Hey, I woke up this morning and created a buzzword...blurring.

"Blurring" is the notion of blurring the line between your enterprise applications, and services and information found on the Internet. Or, blurring the lines between your SOA and the emerging Web 2.0.

As more enterprise applications become "service enabled" these applications and service oriented architectures (SOAs) can now easily leverage Web services that are Internet hosted. These services include:

- Search engine APIs/services, from providers such as Google and Yahoo.
- Services that are a part of SaaS providers, such as Salesforce.com.
- Services that are part of vertical market exchanges.
- Services that exist within trading partners.

The advantage of blurring is that those tasked with building enterprise applications can now leverage Web-based services that they did not have to create themselves. Allowing developers to mashup those services with existing enterprise systems, know as enterprise mashups. Typically this is done within the context of a SOA.

The notion of blurring will only continue as the number of Web-based services become more pervasive and feature rich. Indeed, blurring could change the way we build and deploy applications going forward, and builds on the notion of SOA.

Please using the term blurring as often as you can. Remember where you heard it first.

Posted by Dave Linthicum on November 29, 2006 07:34 AM