StrikeIron Launches the StrikeIron Web Services Marketplace; Self-Commercialization of Web Services by Any Publisher Opens New Market Opportunities.

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. -- StrikeIron(TM) Inc., a worldwide leader of Web services commercialization through the StrikeIron Web Services Business Network(TM) (WSBizNet(TM)), today announced the StrikeIron Web Services Marketplace that greatly simplifies the selling and buying of Web services for a broad audience of providers and users, while simultaneously supporting commercial Web services integration by ISVs and Solution Providers.

The StrikeIron Marketplace is available as part of a new release of the StrikeIron Web Services Business Network and provides a complete self-publishing capability for providers and a consistent and simplified authentication, subscription, and management capability for users.

"StrikeIron is focused on enabling a commercial market for, and accelerating the adoption of, publicly available Web services," said Sandra Rogers, IDC's Program Director for SOA, Web Services, and Integration research. "The StrikeIron solution provides an online directory and infrastructure with commerce administration functions designed specifically for proliferating access of Web services between organizations."

"The StrikeIron Web Services Marketplace provides the next evolution in the market for the buying and selling of XML-based Web services," said Bob Brauer, President and Co-founder. "Now, any Web services innovator can take advantage of our Web services e-commerce infrastructure, tools and online services to significantly reduce go-to-market costs and accelerate their visibility and adoption in the industry. Meanwhile, users of the Marketplace get a comprehensive, consistent and simplified mechanism to quickly discover and leverage a broad range of Web services in a trustworthy environment."

This new Web Services Marketplace has been specifically designed for Web services commerce including subscription, purchasing, publishing, account management, billing, payment, security and usage tracking at the micro-transaction level of multiple Web services among multiple users. Benefits to these users, including Web service providers, users, ISVs and solution providers include the following:

Web Service Providers

Providers can easily self-publish with a wizard driven set of forms providing a comprehensive range of configuration, pricing and market listing flexibility. Providers have access to a complete range of services including authentication, pricing, billing and accounting, usage reporting, user tracking, security, uptime monitoring, choice of protocol, redundancy, analysis tools, productivity tools, documentation tools and much more.

This is the ideal solution for new publishers who want to commercialize their Web service offering or existing publishers who want a more effective way to sell their current commercialized Web services.

Providers already publishing in the StrikeIron Marketplace include Avalinx, Cdyne, DesertSoft, RealEDA, Relevant Automation, SourceKit, and Xignite, letting them expand their market opportunities, increase their marketing and selling reach, and drive new sources of revenue while eliminating the need to invest in any additional infrastructure.

"The StrikeIron Web Services Marketplace provides the ideal opportunity to further leverage our assets and create new sales channels with a minimum of investment," said Scott Elder, President of DesertSoft.

Users

Users who subscribe through the StrikeIron Marketplace have instant access to a rich set of functionality and data and can take advantage of more flexible choices of protocols, simplified sign-on and billing and accounting across all the Marketplace Web Services, flexible pricing alternatives, and integrated tools and services to accelerate their utilization.

As a result they can easily enhance their Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) development, CRM applications, and Web site commerce applications by integrating real-time external customer, company, and government data. Examples include real-time address verification, email verification, reverse phone lookup, global SMS text messaging, state and local tax rates, residential and business data enhancement lookups and much more.

ISVs and Solution Providers

ISVs and Solution Providers now have a way to easily integrate commercial Web services into their applications to provide new value with real-time external data access and functionality. StrikeIron provides a StrikeIron Marketplace Integration Web Service for plug and play access to the StrikeIron Marketplace API directly into their applications.

This is an ideal solution for integration of live data directly into real-time business processes to increase productivity and lower costs, for example, in CRM applications, customer contact management, data quality cleansing, and company competitive and financial data. Web services can be used to implement live data feeds and thus eliminate the time consuming, costly and error prone methods of bulk data importing, exporting and cleanup resulting in greater productivity at a lower cost.

About StrikeIron

Based in Research Triangle Park, NC, StrikeIron, Inc. is a leader in Web services commercialization with its breakthrough StrikeIron Web Services Business Network(TM) (WSBizNet(TM)). WSBizNet includes the premier StrikeIron Web Services Marketplace as the central e-commerce location for anyone to easily buy and sell Web services with advanced self-service publishing and subscription capabilities and integrated tools and services. The StrikeIron Web Services Marketplace provides the most reliable and trusted commercial Web services available in the market across the broadest spectrum of business needs. The Aurora Funds, Inc. provided funding for StrikeIron after recognizing the significant opportunity presented by Web services and this unique management team. For more information, visit www.strikeiron.com.

StrikeIron, Web Services Business Network, WSBizNet, StrikeIron Web Services Marketplace, StrikeIron Marketplace Powered, and Web Services Marketplace, are trademarks of StrikeIron, Inc. All other brands or product names are the property of their respective holders.