June 19, 2007 19:33 ET

IBM Initiative to Move Web 2.0 to Center Stage

BOSTON, MA--(Marketwire - June 19, 2007) - IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced "Web 2.0 Goes to Work," an IBM initiative to help organizations 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.

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.

"IBM is uniquely positioned to develop an information ecosystem to meet the needs of organizations as they adopt Web 2.0 principles and technologies," said Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive, IBM Software Group. "We're combining the collective experience, resources and expertise from across the company to help our customers realize the value of Web 2.0 in the enterprise."

As companies embrace this more dynamic, social Internet, they realize 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.

"Our goal is to make today's consumer-based technologies relevant to businesses by building offerings that deliver a highly-productive and integrated entry into Web 2.0-based solutions," said Jim Deters, president of Ascendant Technology, an IBM Business Partner. "Businesses who do not take advantage of these technologies will be ultimately forced by users into this new computing era or will face significant growth hurdles."

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

--  IBM Lotus Connections -- the industry's first integrated social
    software for business features a suite of five Web 2.0-based components.
    They include the most popular social networking uses such as: social
    bookmarking and tagging, rich directories including skills and projects,
    activity dashboards, collaboration among like-minded communities, and web
    logs or blogging. By making it faster and easier to find experts across the
    organization, bring together diverse teams around a common point of
    interest and access information previously qualified by others, Lotus
    Connections helps people save time and avoid duplication in their daily
    work.
    
--  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 industry-leading commerce software
    incorporates new Web 2.0 capabilities to more closely align with consumers'
    natural shopping experiences and help decrease the incidence of abandoned
    shopping carts through rich and contextual shopping features. The new
    features in WebSphere Commerce Web 2.0 Store Solution include rich Internet
    applications such as an interactive catalog 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. These Web 2.0 capabilities are changing the on-line shopping metaphor from static, catalog-driven experiences to dynamic, customer-driven ones.

An additional focus of IBM's Web 2.0 investment is enabling customers to gain new competitive advantage through the creative integration and transformation of all types of information -- a capability called Info 2.0. IBM is previewing an Info 2.0 suite of integrated products that enables organizations to easily catalog, 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 customizable "mash-ups" -- a website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience.

These Info 2.0 investments complement and extend IBM's cross-company Information on Demand initiative by enabling new innovation in areas that were not previously viable.

As companies begin to adopt Web 2.0 principles and technologies, IBM is continuing its focus on empowering its business partner ecosystem including independent software vendors (ISVs), developers, start-up companies and business partners with Web 2.0 information, expertise, and software tools to help them support growing customer demand for this new set of solutions and technologies.

IBM is also sharing new technologies with information technology professionals through alphaWorks Services, a site that allows organizations to access emerging software services from IBM research and development labs. The site will include mash-up, information management and catalog technologies from Info 2.0 by end of the third quarter. For more information, visit http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com

IBM is making today's consumer-based technologies relevant to businesses by building offerings based on open standards and developing products that provide a highly-productive and integrated entry into Web 2.0-based team collaboration and social computing.

For more information on IBM's Web 2.0 Goes to Work initiative: http://www.ibm.com/web20

IBM, the IBM logo, alphaWorks, Lotus, Quickr and WebSphere are trademarks of IBM Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. Other company, product and service names may be trademarks or service marks of others.