Use Case for using Enterprise Mashup tools - Competitive Analyses

I have been on an Enterprise Mashup kick lately because i think it is an important technology for information delivery in the enterprise so i have been keeping eyes open for enterprise use cases to validate some of my thoughts on using mashup technologies in the enterprise. Via an article in the Wall Street Journal comes a little insight into how a global enterprise -Audi a German automobile manufacturer - is using an Enterprise Mashup server from Kapow Technologies to perform competitive analyses.

Developers at Audi recently built a mashup that helps product managers for the company's A-series line of autos perform competitive analyses. The mashup draws data from 20 different sources, ranging from Audi's inventory system to demographic figures on German Web site Spiegel Online.

Audi's product managers used to check each of the 20 sources individually and copy the results into spreadsheets. While the task was time consuming and inconvenient, Audi's information-technology department didn't want to pay as much as $500,000 to combine all of the data into one application using traditional software-integration techniques, says Anton Hermann Kramm, a member of Audi's IT management team.

Additional Kapow customer stories can be found on their customer reference site providing short snippets of some fairly large enterprise customers as well.