While IBM, Sun, and Microsoft have announced their plans to provide AJAX solutions, one vendor contends that its has a software suite and components that are already available today and are already being deployed by real customers: Berkeley, CA-based Zapatec, Inc.

Founded in 2002 and privately funded, Zapatec aims at medium-to-large enterprise customers and has a roster of customers that includes HP, Boeing, Time Warner Cable and Cartier.

Its standards-based Zapatec AJAX Suite, announced today, works with all modern browsers including IE 5.0+, Mozilla 1.2+, Opera 8.0+, Firefox 1.0+, and Safari 1.2, and uses standard protocols such as HTML, CSS, XML and JSON.

"While several companies like IBM, Sun, and Microsoft have announced their plans to provide AJAX solutions, the Zapatec AJAX Suite and its components are available today, and are already being deployed by real customers," says Dror Matalon, president of Zapatec, a 20-year technology industry veteran.

"Our AJAX components are feature-rich, yet easy to deploy," Matalon continues. "We help developers take their Web applications to the next level by plugging the Zapatec AJAX form or grid into their applications in just a few hours, versus days or weeks."

In other words the Zapatec suite provides developers an easy deployment path, from using multiple components to using the entire suite to provide a full desktop experience, Dror explains.

"The Suite provides ease of AJAX deployment without sacrificing functionality, helping web developers reduce the time and cost to create superior commercial-grade Web 2.0 applications," he adds.