OpenSpan, Apple Mac, Virtualization and SOA (together in Harmony)

I am just about to set off on a weeks vacation and then to Europe so I thought I'd leave you with some of my musings.

So, my Apple Mac I got a couple of weeks back - I love it.

Running VMWARE on a mac is sweet. I have multiple VM machines and it truly creates a discipline of keeping "machines" loaded with software specific for those purposes so they are fast. I can honestly say, my VMWare sessions on my Mac are 2-3 times faster than my standalone Dell PC (My PC was probably more cluttered than it should have been but even so, it's incredibly responsive on the Mac).

Now what is really cool, is I have written a little Mac application that calls a Web Service that OpenSpan exposes in a VMWARE session running on the same machine. This means my "legacy" applications services can now be accessed by building portals/apps on the MAC as well as the PC - inside the same machine. Integrating virtualized applications together this way has been hard, to near impossible and this is no longer the case with OpenSpan. I'll post some screen shots in a few weeks so you can see. It's lightening fast and what it really demonstrates is that any Legacy Application is no longer tied to just one presentation interface and can be mashed up virtually anywhere. We released our OpenSpan SOA addition just a few weeks ago and the power of it in the enterprise is readily apparent. We have lived for years with limited or mostly in fact, zero API's for our desktop applications. No more. It's like legacy applications can finally come alive and participate in the new world of technologies (SOA, Web 2/3.0, Mashups, portals, virtualization). Combine that with the speed in which OpenSpan enables you to build integrations into virtually any legacy application and expose that as service, and what you have is pretty incredible. When we say our customers can be in production with solutions in weeks, we can really demonstrate it.

It's hard to get the stats but I'm willing to bet that OpenSpan now has more licensed customers than all of the desktop integration vendors combined. The number of new clients we are signing up each quarter is amazing. Well I guess it's not really amazing, we have a great product :)

We will also be announcing relationships with some of the core mash-up vendors shortly, so watch this space for that too.

On another important note before I depart on my cruise around the Caribbean in a few hours. Damon Lockwood, our VP of Development and one of the OpenSpan founders (btw - he really is a smart cookie and I have really enjoyed the pleasure of working with him now for 3+ years), has just started his own Blog at DO IT ON THE DESKTOP - The term "Do it on the Desktop" was always a funny term we bantered around now and again for Marketing but it never quite made it to the outside world - I wonder why ;) I can see the tee shirts now :)