If you think mashup tools are only for laying movie stars’ homes on top of Hollywood maps, think again. On Tuesday, IBM announced what it described as “the industry’s first complete mashup portfolio for business.”

Mashups, which IBM defines as “situational applications,” are generally considered to be tools that enable details or functions to be “mashed together” with other notes or an application, with a common view of disparate data sets. A typical consumer use is laying the location of every pizza parlor in town on top of a Google Map.

‘Real-Time Enterprise’

In the IBM suite, the company said the tools will help business workers “do their jobs more effectively” and fulfill the needs of “the emerging real-time enterprise.” Two main tools are the centerpieces of the portfolio: the IBM Mashup Center and WebSphere sMash.

The Mashup Center, whose beta is planned for next week, is designed for the nontechnical user to drag and drop

mashup components from sources on the desktop, the enterprise or the Net, to create and share customized Web applications.

IBM said one company examining the Mashup Center is improving its sales force’s effectiveness by allowing nontechnical users to combine ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management) notes with various business applications.

that mashup allows accounts at that unnamed company to be shown by region, sales history, customer service incidents, and projected sales pipeline by product line. Sales reps can upload their travel plans and account-forecast spreadsheets, resulting in feeds to recommend the most effective customer-engagement strategy, coupled with external knowledge about competitor activity or business environment conditions.

The Mashup Center can accommodate regular info feeds in RSS, ATOM, or XML formats, and provides a singled-out view of various knowledge sets.

The center additionally includes ready-made widgets and a development environment that can access enterprise systems…

Orginal post by Top Tech News