OpenAjax, a loosely organized initiative being driven primarily by IBM, has announced 13 new members. The new members include Adobe, Backbase, Fair Isaac, ICEsoft, Innoopract, Intel, JackBe, Opera, SAP, Scalix, Software AG, TIBCO and XML11.

(The OpenAjax "collaboration," as it's called, was announced in February 2006. Original members, in addition to IBM, include BEA, Borland, the Dojo Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, Google, IBM, Laszlo Systems, Mozilla Corporation, Novell, Openwave Systems, Oracle, Red Hat, Yahoo!, Zend and Zimbra.)

The stated mission of OpenAjax is to "expand AJAX adoption and evolve tools and runtimes that will significantly reduce the development costs and skills required to incorporate AJAX Technology into Web Applications." Some executives from the original membership confided to SYS-CON that the iniative was put together quickly without much in the way of traditional infrastructure, but these same executives expressed confidence in the leadership of IBM's David Boloker (pictured above), who is playing an influential role in OpenAjax.

TIBCO was among the notable companies missing from the original roster. Company representatives told SYS-CON at the time that they had not been in discussions with IBM about OpenAjax, but that they would certainly welcome these discussions.

A measure of infrastructure now seems to be emerging, with announcement of a mid-May summit among the membership to "discuss the present usage of AJAX (and) its growth into new markets."  Members then intend to create a business and technical roadmap "by which members can work toward more universal Ajax support across the desktop and mobile devices."