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StrikeIron Announces Business Mashup Challenge Winner

Apatar Founder and CEO Renat Khasanshyn winner of the best mashup using a StrikeIron service

Research Triangle Park, NC – August 1, 2007 – StrikeIron Inc., the leading provider of Data as a Service (DaaS) today announced the winner of the best mashup using a StrikeIron service at Mashup Camp 4’s Business Mashup Challenge.

Renat Khasanshyn, Apatar Founder and CEO, was awarded the prize for his mashup titled “Salesforce.com SMS Mashup using StrikeIron SMS Web Service”. The mashup allows Salesforce.com users to send SMS (or text) messages to their customers and prospects from within Salesforce. To see more on this mashup please visit: www.apatarforge.org/wiki/x/AQA1.

Mashup Camp 4 took place in Silicon Valley from July 18-19, 2007. The term "mashup" has been coined to describe the ability to rapidly bring together data from the web, enterprise applications and web services to and delivers a richer experience and a wider range of capabilities to the end user. Mashup camp was attended by over 300 developers who were looking at mashups as a way to quickly bring together data both in and outside of the enterprise. The Business Mashup Challenge provided a stage for developers to test their skills using the latest mashup assembly environment in order to drive innovation and demonstrate the power of situational applications to reduce costs and time to market.

"The idea for the ‘Salesforce.com SMS Mashup using StrikeIron SMS Web Service’ wasn’t theoretical. It came from a project Apatar did for Salesforce.com users. At times an SMS message to a customer or prospect makes perfect sense, especially for automated notifications and alerts. The ability to send a one-time SMS message to a Salesforce.com record gives users a new invaluable channel of communication,” stated Khasanshyn.

In addition to the StrikeIron SMS Web Service, the mashup also included customer records, extracted from Salesforce.com using Apatar Data Integration software application, and was assembled on IBM’s QEDWiki. Khasanshyn also won the “Best of Conference” prize along with Mark Madsen, CEO of Third Nature, for their mashup entitled “Cold Call Assistant.”

“The ability to easily integrate text messaging into business applications is powerful. Our Global SMS Web Service is one of the most widely used services in our growing marketplace and we are excited to see it leveraged as part of this contest,” said Bob Brauer, CEO and president of StrikeIron. “Renat’s mashup provides instant business value for Salesforce.com users and is very deserving of this recognition.”

About Apatar

Apatar is the leading provider of open source software tools for the data integration market. With powerful Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) capabilities, Apatar enables its users to easily link information between databases (such as MySQL, Microsoft SQL, Oracle), applications (Salesforce.com, SugarCRM) and the top Web 2.0 destinations (Flickr, Amazon S3). Apatar provides support, training, and consulting services for its integration solutions. Headquartered in Western Massachusetts, Apatar operates a development center in Minsk, Belarus. Apatar is currently used by 250 organizations and individuals worldwide. For more on Apatar, visit www.apatar.com or www.apatarforge.org.

For more information, visit the Apatar Press Room, at www.apatar.com/newsroom.

About StrikeIron

StrikeIron is the leader in providing innovative solutions for delivering data over the emerging Internet. The company’s innovative 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 business users, application developers and enterprise IT professionals 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 from organizations such as Cortera, D&B, Gale, MapQuest, Midnight Trader, Tax Data Systems, The Sports Network, and Zacks.

StrikeIron also offers IronCloud™, the only comprehensive Web services delivery platform that opens up new channels for data distribution and consumption through Web Services. Enterprises of all sizes can now reduce the cost and complexity of managing the challenges of data distribution which include leveraging an existing external hardware and software architecture, controlling and metering access and usage, external monitoring for 24x7 reliability, full usage analytics, as well as multiple authentication scenarios and instead concentrate their focus on making information easier for partners, customers, and distributed business units to access and use. StrikeIron delivers value to over 1,500 customers and partners such as Avaya, BEA, Delivery.com, IBM, Honda Europe, D&B, Siemens, Nike, Swarovski, ShoeBuy, and Exclusive Resorts. For more information, visit www.strikeiron.com.

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Media Contacts:  
Jane Foreman
StrikeIron, Inc.
(919) 467-4545 x112
jane.foreman@strikeiron.com
Kristi Lee
Crossroads Public Relations 
(919) 270-8054
klee@crossroadspr.com

Alex Khizhnyak
Apatar, Inc.
(617) 848-5959
alexey.kh@apatar.com

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