IBM (News - Alert) today announced that its Mashup Center will be hosted as a free trial on the Web, in an effort to help non-technical business people to experiment and build customized mashups.

 

IBM Mashup Center, scheduled for mid-year delivery, allows business people to create situational applications, or mashups, by remixing information from anywhere to gain business insight, according to IBM officials.

 

Featuring an intuitive browser-based tool, IBM Mashup Center allows users to assemble new mashups, thus allowing non-technical users to drag and drop mashup components from personal, enterprise and Web sources to create, deploy and share customized Web applications, according to the company.

 

WIth IBM’s mashup technology, non-technical can 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, company officials say.

 

IBM also announced that in the coming week, it will offer customers the opportunity to experiment with IBM Mashup Center and gain hands on experience for free through IBM’s Web site, Lotus Greenhouse.

 

IBM Mashup Center, officials explained, will be hosted on Greenhouse, which will offer customers an environment to try the technology and evaluate mashup potential without installing anything in their own environment.

 

Officials said that the hosted version of IBM Mashup Center will include widgets from IBM, and a growing network of IBM Mashup Center Business Partners, including StrikeIron and Kapow Technologies.

 

In addition, the offering includes a set of out-of-the-box, business-ready widgets, as well as a catalog for finding and sharing widgets and mashups, according to the company. Officials said that to create new widgets, IBM Mashup Center includes a 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 such as ratings, tagging and commenting to guide users the to useful widgets, according to the company.

 

IBM Mashup Center also provides capabilities for managing information feeds from enterprise sources. Officials said that 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.

 

“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,” commented Larry Bowden, vice president for Portals and Mashups at IBM Software Group.