IBM announces industry's first IBM Mashup Center
ConvergenceAsia staff
08/06/2008

IBM has announced the availability of the industry's first mashup portfolio for business, IBM Mashup Center, and that it will host a free trial version on the Web for users to experiment with and build customised mashups.

The IBM Mashup Center allows business users to create situational applications, or mashups, by remixing information from anywhere to gain business insight and do their jobs smarter and more effectively.

Using IBM's mashup technology, even non-technical users will be able to exploit standards and Web-based technology to gain access to myriad information, such as Web sites and feeds, spreadsheets, databases, applications, unstructured text from an email, video, audio and other information on the Web, and make sense of it all in minutes.

Beginning June 16, 2008 IBM will offer customers the opportunity to experiment with IBM Mashup Center and gain hands on experience for free through IBM Lotus Greenhouse (greenhouse.lotus.com). Lotus Greenhouse is a Web site where anyone can register and try out IBM Mashup Centre, and many other collaborative products, such as IBM Lotus Connections, Lotus Quickr, Lotus Sametime and Websphere Portal.

IBM Mashup Center will be hosted on Greenhouse, giving customers a safe environment to try mashups and evaluate their potential without installing anything in their own environment. The hosted version of IBM Mashup Center will include widgets from IBM, and a growing network of IBM Mashup Center Business Partners, like StrikeIron and Kapow Technologies.

IBM Mashup Center gives users the freedom to create new, light weight applications on the fly and get customised views of disparate information. It includes an intuitive browser-based tool to easily assemble of new mashups, thus allowing nontechnical users to literally drag and drop mashup components from personal, enterprise and Web sources to easily create, deploy and share customised Web applications in minutes.

IBM Mashup Center includes a set of out-of-the-box, business-ready widgets, as well as a catalogue for finding and sharing widgets and mashups. To create new widgets, IBM Mashup Center includes an easy-to-use development environment to construct new widgets from enterprise systems and the Web. Users can also take advantage of built-in Web 2.0 community features like ratings, tagging and commenting to guide users to the most valuable and useful widgets.

IBM Mashup Center also provides extensive and powerful capabilities for managing information feeds from enterprise sources. Information from a wide variety of sources can be mixed, filtered and mashed together to create new information sources and output in many different forms, such as RSS, ATOM or XML.

"A massive number of people have the skills to assemble widgets into very useful business applications but do not have the time or desire to become programmers," said Larry Bowden, Vice President, Portals and Mashups, IBM Software Group.

"IBM Mashup Center is designed for the majority of business users to create situational applications immediately to fill a need - iterate and innovate as they desire, share mashups with others and be empowered, all while letting IT managers sleep at night, knowing the technology is secure and managed at the enterprise level."

An on-premise version of IBM Mashup Center is expected to be delivered mid-year, and pricing details will be made public at that time. 

advertisement