It seems I am not the only one who considers mashups too great an idea to die. After a splashy debut a couple years ago, the approach has received short shrift in most enterprises, making little headway as a useful tool despite great promises of usability, portability, and utility.

Now, various vendors and users, including Intel, Adobe, HP, and Capgemini have gotten together and formed the Open Mashup Alliance to further promote the technology and concepts. Although the general idea is to promote mashups and their use, the "open" in the title shows that they are primarily tackling one of the biggest obstacles to mashup success: vendor lock-in.

The idea behind mashing together data from disparate corporate systems and making use of it in new and innovative ways has all too often run headlong into the concrete wall of proprietary standards. Historically, vendors have benefited most from developing their own storage and communication standards and counting on the difficulty of moving from those standards to those of another vendor to preserve market share. Unfortunately, that's still the case today, and it prevents some of the more useful applications of mashups in many companies.

OMA intends to pilot the development of what they are calling an Enterprise Mashup Markup Language (EMML) for vendors to support that will allow better interaction between various mashup offerings and, presumably, the back end systems they necessarily feed from.