Came across an interesting article from Paul Gillin, who does a great job of explaining a very powerful platform – the Serena Mashup Exchange – in a few simple words.

As I look at the amount of automation we have in place around the Mashup Exchange, the systems powering it, and how we’ve been able to “glue” these systems together for real business value and results, technological progress becomes apparent. SaaS is real, and has real benefits, and the move to SaaS represents another evolutionary step in enbracing the power of the web.

I’m currently attending the Metamorphosis 8.0 show in San Jose today, where we’re hearing about Integration generally. This is another crucial ingredient in the evolution of SaaS – and Pervasive seems to have a great story  – 150 integration adapters that can connect to a SaaS system. More on that later.

There’s lots of buzz in the blogosphere about Enterprise Mashups and Mashups in general: Raf Cammarano, ReadWriteWeb, Forrester, etc. But they all have it wrong — well — kind of.

Mashups are simple, really – here are three points that explain the whole phenomena from start to finish:

1) In music mashups took off when the technology to mix together many songs became readily available. The songs have been available for a long time.

2) The Web takes a previously hidden “tier” of applications (the middle tier) and makes it available to everybody all the time!

3) Tools have now appeared to let ordinary people mash together websites using the accessible middle tier.

Enterprise mashups are even simpler: SOA means that most applications are also making their previously convoluted APIs easier to use, and tools are being built, like Serena’s Mashup Composer, to allow business users to “mash” these applications.

So that’s it: open APIs + mashing platforms = mashups.

Not so complex – huh?