It’s hard to imagine a press release from Big Blue with a discussion of hip-hop, but a couple of weeks ago, IBM put out a release that described its new Enterprise Mashup application, which includes a side reference to the remixing of songs in hip hop music as an origin of mashups.

While I don’t think we’ll see IBM setting its next release to Rap, the concept of the Enterprise Mashup is certainly intriguing, and of course a company that wants to encourage and empower its users to overlay internal content with Web services like Google Maps or another one to create new applications to solve business problems doesn’t need to rely on licensing a product from IBM.

The phrase “Enterprise Mashup” sounds contradictory and intriguing. There’s promise if its done right, but seems like there’s also the potential to create lots of messy mashes too. I’m hoping to delve more into this topic in one of the upcoming Knowledge Management supplements to The Information Advisor.