JackBe’s Presto Brings "Mash-Up" Power and Flexibility to Oracle Users
by Kate Pavao, January 2008
Say your investors want to know how your company’s institutional investments are performing. You could query your Oracle Financials database and print out the results—but information on those sheets of paper will be out of date before you mail or even fax them. But Maryland-based JackBe wants to give your stakeholders real-time access to your enterprise data—and allow you to that data with real-time information from other sources.
Increasingly companies want to create these kinds of “mashups,” which dynamically integrate data from multiple sources whether these sources are internal or external. That’s exactly why JackBe launched its Presto solution in November, a solution that earned it Best Enterprise Mashup Platform in InfoWorld 2008 Technology of the Year Awards in January 2008.
Presto is a family of products built to leverage a service oriented architecture (SOA) and Ajax applications into enterprise mashups. These mashups increase employee productivity, improve the ROI of corporate assets, and ultimately build competitive advantage by increasing work productivity and reducing costs. Presto incorporates corporate information sources including Oracle Databases, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Applications with support for Oracle Single Sign-on (SSO), and can be added to any Oracle environment.
JackBe’s solution is oriented towards power-users and application-developers that need quick access to real-time information, whether or not their mashups have a long shelf life. “No one wants to build very heavy extensive IT-based operations,” says Lynne Capozzi, JackBe’s vice president of marketing. “We’re putting the power in the users hands, so they will not be so dependent on IT, yet we’re very IT compliant around security and reliabilty and scalibility.”
At Oracle OpenWorld this past November, JackBe demonstrated Presto’s prowess, consuming information from an Oracle database and Oracle Financials and visualizing that information on a Google map to track delivery information. This kind of flexability allows users to collect, combine, and analyze data from any available source, internal or external. “The limitation is pretty much just on the information you can get to within the environment,” says Danny Malks, vice president of application platform.
But, he emphasizes, JackBe is not trying to force users to replace existing investments with its own. “One of our big mantras is to embrace not displace existing systems,” he says. “We’re all about integrating with what’s there and providing an environment to make it more dynamic, more collaborative, more data-driven, more user centric.”
Web 2.0-savvy companies “will naturally migrate and look towards mashups,” says Capozzi. But she says the JackBe is also targeting more traditional enterprises, especially those that have Oracle installations or a SOA. “Our plan is to spread the mashup word. We will continue to work with more enterprises on a global basis, helping people discover what is possible with enterprise mashups, how quickly and easy it is to do it, and how it opens up a lot more future of possibilities for the power users and application developers,” she says. “This will be a big year for us.”
With this month’s award from InfoWorld, JackBe is certainly off to a strong start.
