Five minutes to develop a new application — that’s the ultimate nirvana of enterprise mashups, one which seems unrealistic, yet some vendors and analysts have been saying is just around the corner. But is the enterprise truly ready?

I actually used the above headline in a ZDNet blog last June to describe the emerging world of enterprise mashups. I think it’s just as appropriate eight months later as we assess the ongoing progress of mashups within enterprises.

Or, more appropriately, lack of progress. As Ric Smith, product manager for JDeveloper at Oracle, just put it in a recent issue of Java Development Journal: “Despite the momentum behind mashups, corporate IT departments only consume a handful of the services used by the mashup crowd. Instead, businesses have constructed their own ecosystem of services in parallel to the Web 2.0 movement.”

That parallel universe he’s talking about probably refers to SOA, or at least a JBOWS architecture (Just a Bunch of Web Services).

What’s the problem here? Mashups offer a light and easy way to quickly combine necessary data sources and applications from across the enterprise within a front-end UI to bring a new way to look at a problem. What’s not to like?

Rod Smith, vice president of emerging Internet technologies for IBM, declared in a keynote speech that the technologies underpinning blogs, wikis and innovative sites such as Google Maps and Wikipedia on the Web will transform the way productivity applications are developed — in some cases “in as little as five minutes.” End-users (businesspeople, not just developers) will be able to use the palette of Web 2.0 components available for free on the Internet.

However, Oracle’s Smith observed in JDJ that the relatively slow uptake of enterprise mashups is two-fold. “First, the concept of mashups is often considered a social phenomenon or a grassroots effort tangential to enterprise software. Second, there’s no clear path to integrate business services with those available on the Web. This second issue is due, in part, to the impedance mismatch between business services and mashup services. Mashup APIs are generally written in JavaScript, while services deployed to the enterprise are developed using Java or .NET technologies.”

There you have it — mashups are all about scripting. But aren’t time-stretched IT departments increasingly adopting scripting languages as a way to quickly get things done?

My colleague Dion Hinchcliffe agrees that enterprise mashups are a different animal than consumer mashups. In a new post, he observes that “in decades past, the new ideas in computing originated in the enterprise world and trickled down to the consumer world later on (things like databases, computer networks, file servers, and so on). However in the Web 2.0 era… new ideas and approaches are germinating more on the consumer Web than from the enterprise space.”

In fact, many of the innovations that have happened within enterprise IT leeched in from the outside — the PC and PDA were brought in from the consumer world, for example. Oracle’s Smith points out that vendors are placing their bets that mashups will become an enterprise technique as well. IBM has its QEDWiki enterprise “mashup maker” tool that “lets developers blend corporate services with external services, and rapidly assemble applications.” Smith also points to the Oracle WebCenter Suite, which enables users to mix and match corporate services using a combination of AJAX and Java portlets.

This sets the stage for a ‘violent’ collision between the enterprise and consume worlds, as described by ZapThink’s Jason Bloomberg in SDTimes: “On the one hand, you have the whole Web 2.0 thing, which is consumer-oriented, it’s collaborative, it’s Web-based…. There are a few business models out there, but they’re mostly graphical and they mostly take advantage of mapping capabilities.” The other world is the world of SOA, where IT groups are “looking to build loosely coupled services that abstract various sorts of IT capabilities across the organization. What’s happening in the SOA world is that we’re shifting to a greater focus on the service consumer, which is now a piece of software.”

Dion observes that the time may be ripe for mashup adoption within enterprises, where “application backlogs and demand for more software that will improve collaboration and productivity are often rampant,” he said. “Far from having too much software, most enterprises don’t have enough to satisfy demand, despite the prevalence of mountains of existing enterprise systems, many of which are underutilized.”

Or, as IBM’s Smith put it: “Why let the Web 2.0 folks have all the fun?“