Wednesday, January 23, 2008

IBM to Release Mashup Software

A new product lets workers combine simple bits of software to create business tools.

By Erica Naone

Putting pieces together: Lotus Mashups is a new product from IBM that aims to make it easy for people to build software applications by combining existing tools. For example (shown above), a user might combine an organizational map of a company with employee pictures, profile information from the company directory, and a database of files that each person can update. In this example, these features are wired together so that when a user clicks on one person’s picture, this action pulls up the directory information for that person and a list of his files. Credit: IBM

A new product from IBM could help businesses get more from their data by making it easy for workers to mash together simple tools to create something better. Known as mashups, these software applications have been very popular with consumers. But few people have the technical ability to create them. Jeff Schick, vice president of social software for IBM, says that Lotus Mashups will change that, by reducing the technical skill required to combine the applications, and by adding features to protect sensitive data.

"Lotus Mashups will let organizations and communities easily assemble new applications with interoperability across the entire span of [business] tools," Schick said Monday at the Lotusphere conference in Orlando, FL, when he announced the product. An employee could, for example, combine a map of store locations with store inventory information, so that clicking on the location brings up, say, a stock list. Normally, this would require programming skills. But Schick says that with Lotus Mashups, the process is simple: users connect existing applications by dragging and dropping them onscreen.

The product will ship with many premade mini-applications called widgets that can serve as building blocks that users can put together to start making mashups right away, explains Nicole Carrier, program director of the portal segment for IBM. An included tool will help users get data from the Web or company databases and organize it to create a mashup. The system will also include a catalogue area, where users can upload mashups they have made to share with others. Mashups can also be shared through e-mail links, or by embedding them in Web pages.

Carrier says that Lotus Mashups is part of IBM's strategy to make business tools for "the younger generations that have been weaned on MySpace and Facebook." She notes that many business currently use spreadsheets as tools to create simple applications that process data. Mashups, Carrier says, could provide a better way to make some of these applications, particularly because they can be tied to Web services that would help keep data up to date.

"The holy grail for a long time has been to design something that lets the nontechnical person do software engineering," says John Gerken, a senior architect for the Emerging Internet Technologies Software Group at IBM. "This is a step toward that goal." The product's drag-and-drop interface conceals several technical problems that had to be solved to build the software, he says.

Although there's been an explosion of widgets on the Web in the past year, Gerken notes that in most cases, it's easy for users to make widgets share space on a Web page, but not to make them share data. "They're mixable, not mashable," he says. For example, Facebook users can paper their profiles with a variety of simple applications, but those applications are isolated from each other. In contrast, Mashups allows users to combine widgets, so that taking an action within one widget triggers the others to act too. For example, a user could build an application for tracking stock prices of different companies, using a chart as the central widget. The chart could include company name, location, and ticker symbol. Clicking a line in the chart could send data to several connected widgets, such as one that looks up the company name on Google, one that maps the location of the company headquarters, and one that retrieves the most recent stock price for the company. Gerken adds that IBM is participating in the Open Ajax Foundation's effort to create standards for widgets, which will hopefully make it more common for widgets from different sources to share data.