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Mashups Go Mainstream: IBM Launches Industry's First Mashup Portfolio for Business
(Market Wire Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) LAS VEGAS, NV, April 8 / MARKET WIRE/ --
IBM (NYSE: IBM) today unveiled the industry's
first complete mashup portfolio for business, empowering individuals to
create situational applications, or mashups, and to help them do their jobs
more effectively and meet the needs of the emerging real time enterprise.
Innovative companies of every size are beginning to realize the value of
service oriented architecture and possibilities of Web 2.0.
Today's Information Technology departments are under enormous pressure to
allow business users to interact with information on demand, including
text, audio, video and data from the Web -- but must often prioritize
enterprise-wide issues ahead of the needs of individual departments and end
users. This balancing act frequently leads to frustration and missed
opportunities, and causes increasingly tech-savvy business users to embrace
new, simpler technologies, in some cases bypassing central IT departments.
IBM understands the challenges of both sides, and has created a mashup
portfolio to help all types of individual users and teams get the
information they need. The portfolio is centered around two key products:
IBM Mashup Center and WebSphere sMash. Together, these new products enable
everyone from the non-technical business user to the IT Manager to develop
dynamic applications to satisfy an immediate need.
IBM Mashup Center -- for the non-technical line of business user
IBM Mashup Center allows non-technical users -- anyone in a business -- to
literally drag and drop mashup components from personal, enterprise and Web
sources to easily create, deploy and share customized Web applications in
minutes. In addition to the ease-of-use, the product also includes the
management, security and governance capabilities that IT departments
require. The IBM Mashup Center is planned to begin Beta on April 15, 2008.
An early Mashup Center customer is already using these capabilities to
improve their sales force effectiveness. The company is combining core
enterprise ERP and CRM data with a line of business application to show
accounts by region, sales history, customer service incidents and projected
sales pipeline by product line. Sales reps can then upload their own
planned travel and spreadsheets of account forecasts into IBM Mashup Center
which generates feeds to allow them to plan their most effective customer
engagement strategy with better insight about the account including
external Web-based information on the customer's business environment and
even competitor activity.
Business users interact with IBM Mashup Center's browser-based tool to
provide easy assembly of new mashups. The software includes a set of
out-of-the-box, business-ready widgets, as well as a catalog for finding
and sharing widgets and mashups. To create new widgets, IBM Mashup Center
includes an easy-to-use development environment to access enterprise
systems and the Web. Users can also take advantage of built-in Web 2.0
community features like ratings, tagging and commenting.
It also provides the environment for unlocking, transforming and mixing
enterprise, departmental, Web and personal systems while enforcing
enterprise-class security and governance. IBM Mashup Center stores
information feeds from enterprise sources in RSS, ATOM or XML formats to
maximize the types of information that can be unlocked and remixed. With
the ability to merge, transform, filter, annotate or publish information in
new formats, the software helps create a single view of disparate sets of
information in minutes.
The new IBM Mashup Center Product is powered by intuitive user mashup
capabilities from Lotus Mashups, and information access and transformation
capabilities provided IBM InfoSphere MashupHub.
According to research firm Gartner, more than 30 percent of Global 2000
organizations will enter a new era of end-user computing via
user-assembled, composite applications created with enterprise mashup
environments by 2010. IBM is building on nearly three years of leadership
in the mashup space, and working with clients, partners and industry
organizations to help unlock the value of the Web.
"The power of the Web is now in each person's hands," said Kristof
Kloeckner, Vice President, Strategy & Technology, IBM Software Group. "And
businesses are made up of individuals who can be innovators and problem
solvers on their own, without waiting for, and straining IT support."
IBM WebSphere sMash -- development environment for the technical developer
WebSphere sMash provides an agile development environment that supports
today's hottest dynamic scripting languages, enables rapid aggregation of
disparate services and feeds, and employs RESTful approaches to unleash
critical information and services found within a company. This powerful
combination allows companies to use technology to extend the reach of SOA,
better align with business goals and uncover new opportunities to boost
productivity or reach new markets. IBM WebSphere sMash can easily be used
to create widgets for IBM Mashup Center.
For example, a U.S based retailer can use the WebSphere sMash to help
accelerate the start-up of new stores opening overseas. The retailer has
new local partners and employees that need a combined view of internal SOA
services, such as pricing and inventory levels, and external services, such
as currency exchange rates, and external carrier shipment verifications.
This consolidated view of information helps the local partners and
employees quickly uncover new business insights, more effectively
communicate and provide consistent and accurate reporting of sales and
inventory levels to headquarters at the end of each quarter.
A developer's version of WebSphere sMash will continue to be available from
www.projectzero.org as a free download, while the commercial platform will
be sold on a per license basis and will be available in the second quarter
direct from IBM and its partners.
IBM's deep history in open standards, information integration and emerging
Internet technologies, make the company an undeniably strong partner in a
new technology era.
To learn more about IBM's Web 2.0 initiatives, please visit:
www.ibm.com/software/info/web20
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Media Contact:
Kelly Sims
IBM Media Relations
917-472-3456kelly.sims@us.ibm.com
Copyright ? 2008 Market Wire, Incorporated
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