If you think mashup tools are only for laying movie stars’ homes on top of Hollywood maps, think again. On Tuesday, IBM announced what it described as “the industry’s first complete mashup portfolio for business.”
Mashups, which IBM defines as “situational applications,” are generally considered to be tools that enable data or functions to be “mashed together” with other data or an application, with a common view of disparate information sets. A typical consumer use is laying the location of every pizza parlor in town on top of a Google Map.
‘Real-Time Enterprise’
In the IBM suite, the company said the tools will help business workers “do their jobs more effectively” and fulfill the needs of “the emerging real-time enterprise.” Two main tools are the centerpieces of the portfolio: the IBM Mashup Center and WebSphere sMash.
The Mashup Center, whose beta is planned for next week, is designed for the nontechnical user to drag and drop mashup components from sources on the desktop, the enterprise or the Internet, to create and share customized Web applications.
IBM said one company testing the Mashup Center is improving its sales force’s effectiveness by allowing nontechnical users to combine ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management) data with various business applications.
This mashup allows accounts at this unnamed company to be shown by region, sales history, customer service incidents, and projected sales pipeline by product line. Sales reps can upload their travel plans and account-forecast spreadsheets, resulting in feeds to recommend the most effective customer-engagement strategy, coupled with external information about competitor activity or business environment conditions.
The Mashup Center can accommodate regular information feeds in RSS, ATOM, or XML formats, and provides a single view of various information sets.
The center also includes ready-made widgets and a development environment that can access enterprise systems…