Well a few interesting updates from my last Blog!
First, I have turned over to the dark side and brought my self an Apple MacBook Pro (my first Apple since about 1985 !). Of course, I have VMWARE on it and running both XP and Leopard at the same time. My first integration problems were human (aghast, no mouse right-click). I also tried to move my Apple Itunes music from my XP but Apple assumes I am a thief and won’t let me migrate most of my music or even my pictures. My 16 year old son assures me there is a way to do it but likely it will not involve integrated Apple software :)
Second, I am finally hip as I have added a song to my verizon phone (which you'll hear when you call me!). Thick as Thieves. A little biased because the single of this track from the Dashboard confessional album is out next month and my son made the video (and is the star doing the magic – in one take…).
OK, so now onto business. This month saw OpenSpan release it’s version of Studio that enables existing and new automations to be turned into consumable web services with just approximately 10 clicks of a mouse and a few property settings. I show a Microsoft Excel function calling a web service to extract information out of an old VB billing system (hidden), on the fly. It is so fast and robust. What’s really cool too is that Excel and the automation are running in different virtual machines so it is fun to see MS Office and legacy applications work together over virtual machines. I’ve been tracking analysts who started to pass on that enterprises are finding the lack of Virtual-Virtual machine integration a stumbling block! Not any more!
I also have a server, running automations in VMWARE sessions exposing web services to the world. The VMWARE / OpenSpan sessions are integrating into previously closed applications and presenting a web service API (in this case as a REST function). Who would have thought some idiot (me) would web service enable the win32 windows calculator – just to prove a point – LOL – but wickedly cool.
Going to be announcing two other major enhancements in the next few weeks so watch this space. This technology gets more exciting by the minute and judging by the new customer and partner wins we are not alone in this excitement.
Signing off (next post will hopefully be from the Mac ;) ).
