Enterprise mashup service provider Serena Software announced yesterday that it's giving away 12 pre-built mashups aimed at common business tasks. But if mashups are so easy to make, why is giving them away such a big deal?

According to Serena, it's because they aren't necessarily simple: While mashups can make development easier, it's still not something that just anyone can do -- or at least, not something that just anyone can do with little effort. Rather than simply presenting data from multiple sources, they're real applications: closer to BPM (Business Process Management) than to Google Maps.

So who actually builds mashups? Last month, I took part in a Webinar for this site along with two users who were very enthusiastic about Serena's system (and even more enthusiastic about Second Life). At Thomson, it's mostly business analysts who don't necessarily work for the IT department but are still well-versed in the kind of development skills needed.

If Serena gets its way, outside developers also will create mashups that they share with others. But Serena isn't expecting people to just give their efforts away. It wants to create a marketplace for enterprise mashups: If you build something and find it useful, you can post it online and charge others to use it. This hasn't launched yet, so it's hard to say whether it will find many buyers or sellers.

One obvious problem is that mashups designed for one organization could be so customized that they won’t necessarily move well over to others. For this reason, most of the 12 pre-built mashups that Serena offers are fairly generic. Three of them are designed to work with Salesforce.com, where they're having to compete (for developers as well as customers) with Salesforce's own AppExchange.