A consortium of leading technology companies today announced the creation of the Open Mashup Alliance (http://www.openmashup.org), an organization dedicated to the successful use of Enterprise Mashup technologies and adoption of an open language that promotes Enterprise Mashup interoperability and portability.

The Open Mashup Alliance (OMA) founding members includes leading software vendors, consulting companies, technology service providers and industry leaders that share a common interest in promoting the open, free-to-use Enterprise Mashup Markup Language (EMML) for the development, interoperability and compatibility of Enterprise Mashup offerings. The charter members of the OMA include Adobe, Bank of America, Capgemini, Hinchcliffe & Company, HP, Intel, JackBe, Kapow Technologies, ProgrammableWeb, Synteractive, and Xignite.

The EMML specification will be governed under the Creative Commons License and supported by a free-to-use EMML reference runtime engine. The Open Mashup Alliance will steward and enhance the EMML v1.0 specification for future contribution to a standards body.

“We are very excited to be a founding member of Open Mashup Alliance and to foster mashup interoperability and portability through an open language. EMML was designed specifically to address the needs of Enterprise Mashup developers. We are proud to contribute this industry-proven language to the mashup community,” said Deepak Alur, Vice President of Engineering at JackBe and co-author of “Core J2EE Patterns.”

Membership in the Open Mashup Alliance is open to all organizations or individuals with an interest in the advancement of EMML and Enterprise Mashup interoperability and compatibility. More information is available on the Open Mashup Alliance website at www.openmashup.org. The EMML specification, along with a supporting runtime reference implementation, documentation, and sample code, is also available on the Alliance website.

Statements from Charter Members:

“Using Adobe’s Rich Internet Applications (RIA) technology, enterprise customers are exploring mashups to deliver contextual, task centric workspaces that aggregate information from different backend applications. Together with the founding members of the Open Mashup Alliance, Adobe will continue to encourage the interoperability and compatibility of different mashup platforms to help accelerate adoption in the enterprise,” said Kumar Vora, vice president and general manager for LiveCycle at Adobe.

Michael Ogrinz, principal architect at Bank of America and author of the book ‘Mashup Patterns’ commented, “For enterprise mashups to take hold, we need to remove the ‘vendor lock-in’ concerns raised by today’s proprietary toolsets. We also need to inspire the innovative minds of the open-source community to start working in this space. By establishing an open standard for mashups, the OMA and EMML addresses both of these issues.”

"Capgemini clients around the world are achieving excellent results with Enterprise Mashup solutions but know their risk can be reduced and their value can be increased by solutions that are built upon standardized vendor products. We are pleased to be a founding member in this association with these key objectives," said Andy Mulholland, Global CTO at Capgemini and co-author of the book “Mashup Corporations.”

"The Open Mashup Alliance offers organizations a proven, standardized model that will help increase mashup adoption in organizations, increase flexibility and choice in agile integration scenarios, and reduce the risk and cost for many kinds of IT projects," said Dion Hinchcliffe, founder of Web 2.0 University and president of Hinchcliffe and Company.

“Enterprises can accelerate return on investment, reduce the risks of mashup efforts and deliver real-time reporting of dynamic information to business users by adopting industry-wide open standards like EMML,” said Tim Hall, Director, SOA Center, HP. “HP's collaboration with Open Mashup Alliance members to promote the standard design of mashups will help customers advance their SOA initiatives by allowing them to provide a rich user experience on top of their web services.”

“With over 300 global enterprises using Kapow Technologies, the delivery of real-time Web data to mashups is essential for enabling business agility,” says Stefan Andreasen, Founder and CTO of Kapow Technologies. “And the efforts of the Open Mashup Alliance are key in creating standards such as EMML to drive the interoperability of mashup offerings and will lead to greater benefits for more organizations.”

“At ProgrammableWeb we have tracked the evolution of enterprise mashups and have seen first-hand the challenges posed by lack of compatibility across mashup platforms. By establishing open standards such as EMML, the Open Mashup Alliance is addressing these issues by enabling product interoperability, reducing risk, and ultimately creating new opportunities for enterprises implementing mashups,” said John Musser, founder of ProgrammableWeb.

"Dozens of government transparency and openness initiatives are being supported by mashup implementations. The OMA and EMML will give Synteractive's public sector clients better interoperability and portability of these mashup solutions," said Evan Burfield, CEO of Synteractive.

Stephane Dubois, CEO and founder of on-demand market data provider Xignite said, “As a commercial web service pioneer, Xignite has seen our clients speed up their consumption of on-demand data and open APIs as they become easier to consume and mashup into applications. An initiative like the OMA will accelerate this trend and reduce application development complexity and data management costs for enterprises. We are excited to join our efforts with those of other OMA charter members.”