An assortment of vendors are releasing enterprise mashup development tools during this week's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, but those announcements may gain additional resonance from news that broke about two weeks ago, when IBM announced a pair of mashup-related product releases.
"Anytime IBM gets into something, it usually calms people down as something safe to use in their business," said Michael Coté, an analyst with Redmonk.
Generally speaking, mashups are applications that combine data from a number of sources and present them through a rich user interface. They are meant to be built quickly and easily, and in many cases accessed over the Web. The concept first took hold with consumer-oriented applications that mashed publicly available data sources, such as Google Maps and event listings.
