SYS-CON Events (www.events.sys-con.com) announced today that IBM has joined the charter sponsors of the First International AJAXWorld Conference & Expo (www.ajaxworldexpo.com) as "Gold Sponsor." The conference will take place October 2-4, 2006, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California.

With IBM joining the event as a Gold Sponsor, the lineup of charter sponsors and exhibitors of the conference now comprises some of the leading AJAX technology providers in the world, including Adobe, IBM, TIBCO, Backbase, ComponentArt, Helmi Technologies, Laszlo Systems, Nexaweb, telerik, Google, Parasoft, ILOG, Apress, and Zapatek.

OASIS is sponsoring AJAXWorld 2006 as Association Sponsor, while the Media Sponsors include some of the most well-known and respected magazines and websites; SYS-CON.TV and AJAXWorld Magazine are the two Platinum Media Sponsors. Other Media Sponsors include: BZ Media, DevTown Station, Eclipse Developer's Journal, Eclipse Review, Enterprise Open Source Magazine, Integration Developer News, ITtoolbox, Java Developer's Journal, Methods & Tools, Enterprise Open Source Magazine, Open Enterprise Trends, Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance Journal, SD Times, Software Test & Performance, SOA Web Services Journal, Web 2.0 Journal, and Web Developer's & Designer's Journal.

IBM's Jon Ferraiolo will present a session on the OpenAJAX Alliance at the conference. The initiative arose from about six months of "discussions, meetings at conferences, and wikis" according to David Boloker, IBM Software Group's CTO of Emerging Internet Technologies. Boloker was acknowledged as a key voice and driver of this initiative by executives from several other companies involved, with one exec describing him as "the real thing" in his commitment to open-source development and its potential as a legitimate enterprise IT application development approach. Ferraiolo has now taken over from Boloker as the de facto leader of the Alliance, leaving Boloker himself to devote himself, at AJAXWorld, to a session entitled QEDWiki, A Web 2.0 Application Assembler for the Mass Market.