StrikeIron to deliver Business Services through the IBM SOA Business Catalog

Research Triangle Park, NC – July 19, 2007 – StrikeIron Inc., a leading provider of Data as a Service (DaaS), today announced its acceptance by IBM as a content provider to the IBM SOA Business Catalog. Over the next 60 days StrikeIron will list 100 business services, from their Web Services Marketplace™, into the IBM SOA Business Catalog. The business services are tested and verified on IBM platforms and are available for immediate download and use through the StrikeIron Web Services Marketplace.

“SOA is an increasingly important business requirement for organizations because of the business flexibility it enables,” said John Gordon, Director of Channels Marketing IBM SOA and WebSphere Software. “StrikeIron’s commitment to delivering data that integrates easily with SOA efforts provides their customers with a powerful way to reduce integration costs while rapidly deploying applications. Placing their assets in the IBM SOA Business Catalog offers IBM customers a central location for accessing reusable business services.”

The StrikeIron Web Services Marketplace offers data services from providers such as D&B, MapQuest, Zacks, IDExec, Cdyne and YP.com. By delivering data as a service, StrikeIron reduces the complexity of finding, buying, and integrating data for over 700 customers currently integrating StrikeIron data into their Web sites and business applications.

“Web Services are a building block for SOA. Ultimately, IBM’s SOA Business Catalog will bring together a critical mass of validated content web services, to enable the rapid deployment of SOA implementations,” said Bob Brauer, president and CEO of StrikeIron. “By offering one-stop access to easy-to-integrate high quality data in the IBM SOA Business Catalog, we are enabling enterprise customers to quickly meet the demands of extending their SOA.”

Now IBM customers can leverage StrikeIron services with confidence by using the most sought after business information and making it easily accessible and immediately useful in WebSphere applications. A broad range of StrikeIron Web services, including US Address Verification, Real-time Stock Quotes, Sales and Use Tax and Country Calling Codes, can now be integrated with WebSphere products to create rich applications across multiple industries including eCommerce, CRM, Finance, Retail, Insurance and Manufacturing. For more on the IBM SOA Business Catalog, please visit: http://www.ibm.com/soa/soabusinesscatalog.

StrikeIron Web services have been verified by IBM and can be readily consumed by WebSphere products including WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus and WebSphere Process Server. A few examples of how combining StrikeIron Web Services and IBM Web are illustrated below:

Finance: A customer wishing to develop an automated stock trading application could combine Strike Iron services with IBM WebSphere Process Server (WPS). WPS can call the StrikeIron Real-Time Stock Quotes Basic web service and obtain the price of the stock, the date and time the price was captured, as well as the price change from the previous capture. This information could be fed into a business process flow to create a process for buying or selling stock.



Retail: To reduce shipping costs and provide quicker delivery of products, an existing item shipment application can be enhanced to use StrikeIron’s Mapquest Basic Mapping web service to determine from which warehouse it should ship an item. The existing application uses the IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus (WESB) to translate the existing application data format to the web service requests used by StrikeIron's web services. Using the results from the web service, the employees in the shipping department can determine if the products should be delivered from their own warehouse or from a business partner’s.



About StrikeIron

StrikeIron is the leader in Data as a Service, facilitating the consumption and distribution of live data and business functionality over the Web. The company’s breakthrough Web Services Marketplace provides a technology platform, micro-transaction management and a consistent interface across many XML-based Web services from multiple, diverse sources. This allows end-users and ISVs to customize and integrate external data sources and additional external functionality into enterprise, Web, and composite applications. Currently, StrikeIron provides over 100 live data sources and business functions as well as a set of products and tools to simplify and accelerate the consumption of data such as StrikeIron’s SOA Express, enabling business users to access live data via front office applications. StrikeIron services over 700 customers and partners such as BEA, Delivery.com, IBM, Honda Europe, D&B, Time Warner, Siemens, Nike, Kenwood, and Exclusive Resorts. For more information, visit www.strikeiron.com.