Corporate mashups? The idea of putting information stored in various application systems on a single screen for the end user isn't new. When Yahoo! first popularized the Web portal, people suddenly had the experience of seeing information from different places on one screen and businesses quickly caught on to the portal concept.

Not surprisingly, providing composite views of data is often central to business operations. More than ever composite views of information are core to securities trading, shipping and logistics, telecommunications, customer service call centers, and other industries' primary operational activities. Of course providing this capability has been technically challenging to achieve atop previous generations of application architectures that were largely monolithic systems generally incompatible with one another. And so the integration software market came into being - an entire industry segment dedicated to getting the heterogeneous landscape of business information technology systems to work together.