In his latest analysis, Dion Hinchcliffe reports fest-breaking progress in the area of user-created applications, or mashups. For example, he noted that there were at least nine different announcements around Web-based mashups coming out of the recent Web 2.0 conference.

Dion said that many business end users — still accustomed to forwarding their requirements over to IT when they need an application built — may not be ready to build their own front end interfaces. “The biggest challenge of all: The habits and expectations of the larger part of a generation of workers who don’t yet realize mashups are poised to change many things about the software landscape on the Web and in the workplace,” he writes.

Dion also observed that “the tools that empower users to weave together existing Web parts and open APIs into the exact solutions they need are just now becoming easy enough and robust enough to readily enable these scenarios.”

This is in line with research I have been involved with (Evans Data), which, in a recent survey of 380 enterprises, found that the greatest obstacle to user application creation, cited by 22% of respondents from a list, is the lack of availability of easy-to-use assembly tools.

However, help seems to be on the way, in the form of an emerging industry, including companies such as JackBe, DreamFace, Intel, IBM Lotus, Kapow, and Serena. Dion cites the latest market overview from Forrester, which estimates that this space is expected to grow into a $700 million a year industry sector by 2013, or about 1% of the entire software industry.

Now, granted, 1% is a very small chunk, but it will be a very potent chunk — one that’s grabbing the attention of more vendors. “One thing is now clear in this burgeoning new industry; that there is genuine interest in being a leading provider of enterprise mashup tools as organizations begin getting serious about applying them to make the development of Web-based business solutions faster, more commonplace, and less costly,” Dion says.

Dion also observes that “many of the issues that have been holding mashups back are beginning to be resolved.” Such issues included lack of a common assembly model, an immature services landscape, uncertainty about management support, security concerns, and data quality concerns. As more vendors emerge or wrap their offerings around mashup capabilities, mashups will become a more ubiquitous part of enterprise computing.