JackBe Raises $9.5M, Provides Mashups for the Enterprise
Mark Hendrickson
14 comments »
We don’t often cover enterprise news, but JackBe has built an enterprise-oriented business on top of a very Web 2.0 concept: the mashup. And apparently this strategy has been working out well for them - they just raised $9.5M from Harbert Venture Partners and Core Capital Partners, as well as from existing investors Intel Capital, Darby Technology Ventures and Blue Chip Venture Company
The concept behind JackBe’s software package, Presto, is both simple and bewildering to me. On the one hand, it’s easy to explain: the software sits behind the firewall on the servers of corporate IT departments, channels information from a range of sources (using SOAP, RSS, etc.), and proffers it to the end user through the browser. The user can then mix and match the data (a la Yahoo Pipes) right in the browser to perform analysis. Mashups are created primarily in ten different ways (using graphs, maps, grids, etc.) and can be shared with other users within a corporation or organization.
On the other hand, the sheer number of possibilities with a generic mashup program like Presto makes it hard to come up with even one standard example of what the software can do. If you check out JackBe’s customers page, you’ll see that Citigroup uses Presto for “Tax Collection, Bank Tellers, Credit Workflow, Branch executives, Insurance Quoting/Sales and eBanking”; the Defense Intelligence Agency uses it to “paint a picture of situational awareness across various intelligence data sources, using a paradigm of drag-and-drop and bookmarking of the resulting briefing in a private workspace for future use and sharing”; and Tupperware uses it “to provide real-time price, inventory and product updates to field sales representatives.” I think you get the point.
JackBe - which is based in Washington, DC - began 18 months ago as a creator of Ajax widgets but realized that enterprises wanted more thorough ways to consume data. Competitors include IBM and BEA.
Check out this InfoWorld article for more in-depth coverage of Presto.
B-u-b-b-l-e
Well this is what the pre web 2.0 world used to call SoA a.k.a Service Oriented Architecture. Appying a Serivce Layer to your legacy applications so that the presentation layer could use those services over the Enterprise Service Bus, without knowing the complexity of the underlying applications.
http://www.meetingflex.com
Custom Social Networks
It’s seems like an interesting concept… the trick is getting the important data in the first place. I imagine the setup for really useful applications (ones using non-generic data sources) is pretty steep.
huh?
Pinch me.
“JackBe” financed by “Blue Chip Venture” and “Core Capital Partners”.
And to do what? “Mash Up for the enterprise” of course.
Was the whole thing generated by Bullshitr?
I’m pretty sure today is not April fool’s day, so is it a new Halloween tradition you’re starting Mark?
As Mc Enroe likes to say, you can’t be serious…
I forgot:
“competitors include IBM and BEA”
but when you’re backed by Blue Chip Venture and Core Capital, and your VP Marketing genius came up with “JackBe”, what’s there to fear?
Wow, Just saw this come across. Congrats JackBeans on the transition from a leading Ajax player to the the leader in Enterprise Mashup players. Cheers, Mike
Great product. Long way to go!
I have tried this product out. Great! Waiting for the next release.
SOA is very big in the enterprise space because most companies buy line of business solutions rather than hand the cheque book over to one vendor. As a result, there are a lot of data silos and there’s much that can be gained by “mashing up”, to use web 2.0 speak, the data.
…and myworklight.com
Ian. There is a software solution out there that specializes in creating data feeds. http://www.kapowtech.com Create APIs for any web asset.
Speaking of Enterprise coverage- whatever happened to the Enterprise Techcrunch that was buzzing around last year?
http://danielabarbosa.blogspot.....prise.html
Does this suck less than other Enterprise software?
http://www.37signals.com/svn/p.....ware-sucks