WorkLight and Dapper Bring Together the First Secure Mashup of Enterprise Applications and Web Data

August 3, 2007; 02:01 AM
WorkLight™, an Enterprise 2.0 company, and Dapper, a web-based service that allows anyone to build an information feed or an programmatic interface (API) for any website, today announced a partnership that enables organizations to freely mix web content with protected enterprise application data. This cooperation offers business people, for the first time, the ability to create secure enterprise application/web mashups.

An "enterprise mashup" uses Web 2.0 technologies like AJAX and RSS to combine information from multiple data sources in a meaningful way, so that implementations can be fast, personalized, secure, and flexible. Enterprise mashups are generating interest because of the enormous business value they provide, with little or no programming overhead. However, to date, mashups have been limited to the custom mixing of tabular data with open web applications (i.e. that have published APIs), such as Google maps.

Several months ago, WorkLight announced a breakthrough that provided, for the first time, the ability to securely mash up data from disparate enterprise applications. Independently, Dapper was launched to easily enable the extraction and reuse of content, allowing anyone to create RSS feeds and APIs for any website. With today's announcement, WorkLight and Dapper make it possible for the first time, to combine protected enterprise application information with data from any website, inside or outside the corporate firewall.

Some examples of real-world enterprise mashups include the following:

• sales representatives compare existing customer service plans with competitors' plans. In this case, Dapper retrieves competitors' offerings from multiple Internet web sites. WorkLight provides customer details from an internal CRM application, and then mashes up the data in a meaningful and graphical way within an AJAX-based gadget, so that sale reps can easily compare existing plans with competitor's offers. Reps can focus on the sales job at hand, rather than waste time mapping out the constantly-shifting competitive landscape.
• investment managers automatically assess the impact of stock news on their customers' portfolios. In this case, Dapper provides stock market news items from Internet web sites. WorkLight extracts data from customer portfolio management applications and then mixes the data and news. The managers effortlessly pinpoint customers holding stock related to a news item, and can then respond immediately. Valuable time is gained and customer service is improved.

The range of mashup possibilities is endless, running the gamut from marketing to sales, to customer service, to business intelligence and beyond. The ability to easily combine heretofore unconnected data in a highly personalized, meaningful way creates new business opportunities, while saving valuable time and preventing costly errors.

"A key part of the Enterprise 2.0 vision is to provide highly personalized, yet secure access to data residing in disparate information systems, wherever the information resides, inside or outside the firewall,” said David Lavenda, VP Marketing and Product Strategy of WorkLight. “As a result of today's partnership, personnel now have personalized access to all the information they need to do their jobs, in easy-to-use Web 2.0 formats like desktop gadgets or personalized home pages."

“Enterprise mashups are generating a lot of interest, however, creating mashups is dependent on getting the appropriate data feeds (e.g. RSS, XML) with the relevant pieces of data to mash up. Many times, the exact data required is not available as an existing feed. “said Jacob Ukelson, VP Products of Dapper, “That is why Dapper’s universal feed creator capabilities represent a critical mashup enabler, allowing anyone to easily and quickly create a feed from any site, and then use it to serve a business need.”

About WorkLight™

WorkLight™ extends the reach of enterprise applications, by allowing your non-technical staff to access the application data they need to do their jobs via tools like RSS, personalized home pages, widgets and gadgets, instant messaging, social bookmarking and others. WorkLight’s benefit is a substantial employee productivity gain, since people can find and use the information they need, quickly, efficiently and securely. Its enterprise-ready technology is scalable and conforms to existing and future corporate security and access-control policies.

WorkLight received the “Stay Organized” award at Microsoft’s 2007 Under the Radar Conference. It was also named a Red Herring International finalist in recognition of new technologies that have strategically shifted U.S. and international markets. Recently, WorkLight was deemed an "Enterprise 2.0 start-up to watch" by Information Week magazine. For more information, visit www.myworklight.com.

About Dapper

Dapper™ (www.dapper.net) is a free, web based service that allows anyone to make a feed or API for any website. ut simply, Dapper is an easy way to make dynamic feeds that change when the content on the original page changes, or based on user input. No other service like it exists, allowing you to easily create an interactive feed from any website for consumption on any platform: your RSS reader, your iGoogle, your enterprise mashup, your mobile phone - all for free.

To the end user, Dapper is a powerful tool to make and consume the entire web in feeds and widgets. To the developer, the world of all the web's content is at their fingertips with SLAs available to ensure guaranteed bandwidth and support, and a content marketplace in place to let content owners retain control. The many examples of creative applications made possible through Dapper (ProfileLinker.com, TableStalker.com, etc.) and the thousands of Dapper user-created feeds accessible to the world all attest to the message we deliver to our users every day: The web is your playground.