Mashups on Ulitzer

"The more I look at what they've done, the more I realize they've built a business platform more than a technology platform," said Sam Ramji, Vice President of Strategy at Sonoa Systems, as it was announced today that MindTouch, the open source alternative to Microsoft SharePoint, has today extended its popular enterprise collaboration platform to the cloud.

"MindTouch has essentially built an open source, cloud-enabled SharePoint that is accessible to non-programmers," Ramji added.

The new "MindTouch Cloud" offering makes it easy for business power users with no programming knowledge, says the company, to mashup data from existing enterprise systems into real time charts, graphs, reports and tabular data.

"This solves the business problem of accessing critical line of business information," said Aaron Fulkerson, Founder and CEO, MindTouch.

"Previously, business users would have to wait weeks or even months to get to the information they need to make intelligent decisions, Fulkerson continued, "And the end result was static, difficult-to-0share and challenging to collaborate on. Anyone who has to track and collaborate across the silos of a supply chain, cull data from multiple data sources monthly or report across CRM, support, financial, etc knows the tremendous value of automation with MindTouch."

"MindTouch Cloud allows companies to replicate the features and functionality of MindTouch 2009 Standard in seconds with the swipe of a credit card and without a call to their IT department," Fulkerson added.

MindTouch Cloud is the third major release in the company's "collaborative networks" roadmap. It follows the September launch of MindTouch Collaborative Knowledge Base, the first packaged solution of its kind to enable safe crowd sourcing of product documentation. In June, the company launched MindTouch Collaborative Intranet, which tackled the failure of current corporate portals and enterprise social networks to deliver value to business users.

MindTouch is offering a 30-day free trial of MindTouch Cloud at http://cloud.mindtouch.com/.