IBM Initiative to move Web 2.0 to centre stage
ConvergenceAsia staff
26/06/2007

IBM has announced "Web 2.0 Goes to Work", an IBM initiative to help organisations bring the value of Web 2.0 - such as easy access to information, rich, browser-based applications, and social networking and collaboration software - into the enterprise in a security-rich, reliable way.

"We’re combining the collective experience, resources and expertise from across the company to help our customers realise the value of Web 2.0 in the enterprise," said Steve Mills, Senior Vice President and Group Executive, IBM Software Group.

Web 2.0 is about combining content, collaboration and rich user experiences that are transforming the Internet from static web pages into a dynamic platform for social interaction, while enabling the creation of powerful, web-based applications.

As companies embrace this more dynamic, social Internet, they realise the benefits of having a service-oriented architecture (SOA). While SOA helps build a flexible computing infrastructure, Web 2.0 arms users and communities with software assets needed to create a new class of rich, lightweight and easily deployed software solutions.

To help companies deploy Web 2.0 technologies, IBM is announcing the availability of enterprise-ready offerings:

- IBM Lotus Connections -- an integrated social software for business which features a suite of five Web 2.0-based components. They include: social bookmarking and tagging, rich directories including skills and projects, activity dashboards, collaboration among like-minded communities, and web logs or blogging.

- IBM Lotus Quickr -- an open standards-based team collaboration tool that helps teams inside and outside a company firewall easily and effectively work together across geographies, work styles and operating systems. It offers a rich set of team collaboration capabilities, including blogs, wikis and team space templates supporting a variety of business processes to get a collaboration project up and running quickly.

- IBM WebSphere Commerce -- the commerce software that incorporates new Web 2.0 capabilities. The new features in WebSphere Commerce Web 2.0 Store Solution include rich Internet applications such as an interactive catalogue to enable shoppers to narrow down choices by filtering products or services with attributes most important to them.

Additionally, this store solution includes a single-page checkout to let shoppers view the real-time impact of intended purchases and then recalculate the cost of alternate products and shipping choices to help speed up the buying-decision process.

An additional focus of IBM's Web 2.0 investment is the Info 2.0 suite of integrated products that enables organisations to easily catalogue, combine, transform and remix any type of data and content by drawing on the industry's widest variety of enterprise data sources and a vast array of web data and content.

With Info 2.0 capabilities, line-of-business users can quickly create customisable "mash-ups" - a web site or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience.

IBM is also sharing new technologies with information technology professionals through alphaWorks Services, a site that allows organisations to access emerging software services from IBM research and development labs. The site will include mash-up, information management and catalogue technologies from Info 2.0 by end of the third quarter.

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