... out of IT departments. Corporate videos with high production values have been around forever. Making them useful and available to business units, partners and customers is a relatively recent phenomenon, says Ted Cocheu, CEO of Altus Learning Systems Inc. in Los Gatos, Calif. To make them useful, he says, videos must be searchable by the spoken word. According to Sebastian Grady, Altus' chief operating officer, the company's Rapid eLearning service records corporate presentations, manually indexes the spoken text, synchronizes it to video and PowerPoint images, and stores everything on a private, secure Web site. The site can be accessed only by authenticated users. Grady says Rapid eLearning also indexes company podcasts. By Q2 of next year, Cocheu says, Altus will add community and collaboration tools, such as video-content-related discussion forums. Although hardly a path to Hollywood, CIOs might consider directing a few programs to prepare end users for upcoming software rollouts. End users would be able to search the instructional videos only for the parts that interest or involve them, saving them time and making you a star, at least in their eyes. There's a one-time, implementation-specific charge to set up a Rapid eLearning Web site. After that, it's US$2 per month per user.
... data types to create new applications. Some mixes are easy, but some can be a "beast," says Marc Priolean, vice president of marketing at deCarta Inc. in San Jose. The easy stuff, such as blending a database of restaurants and hotels to a static map, is nice, but it's not where the action is, he says. The company's Drill Down Server (DDS) software can be used to create interactive routing maps that improve fleet logistics by giving drivers more precise routes that take into account real-time traffic, time-based turning restrictions, right-turn/left-turn driving patterns and other events that affect delivery performance and driving costs, Priolean notes. "Routing algorithms are a very complex beast," he says. This week, deCarta will release a beta version of its draggable maps feature using JavaScript. The DDS software is custom-priced.
... apps like magic. Next month, JackBe Corp. in Chevy Chase, Md., will release a beta version of its Presto software, which can help IT create and manage interactive, Web-based applications. Chief Technology Officer John Crupi calls Presto "upperware" because it sits above your service-oriented architecture middleware, authorizing AJAX-based apps to use available SOA services. Presto includes an AJAX Service Bus, so apps can subscribe to SOA-based events that are automatically sent to a browser. Likewise, an enterprise service director governs all of your available SOA services so IT can control access to those services. Crupi targets Q1 of 2007 for the final release of Presto. Pricing will be $20,000 per CPU.
... services for agent-free SOA management. Non-SOA tools often have SOA capabilities, so why not use them? That's the logic behind the release later this quarter of AmberPoint 5. According to Ed Horst, vice president of marketing at AmberPoint Inc. in Oakland, Calif., the updated software will continue to use its agents on systems and software to enforce runtime policies for SOA services. In the update, however, the governance engine in AmberPoint is no longer solely dependent on agents. Some hardware and software products, such as the enterprise service bus from Iona Technologies PLC in Dublin and switches and routers from F5 Networks Inc. in Seattle, include services that AmberPoint can now manage without adding agents. Pricing starts at $35,000 per CPU. Agents, if you need them, are free.
... local network traffic like a god. Zeus Technology Ltd. in Cambridge, England, plans to release next month a version of its Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager (ZXTM) to work as a virtual appliance with a VMware Inc. server. And, says CEO Paul Di Leo, Zeus is "in discussions with" XenSource Inc. in Palo Alto, Calif., to offer similar services for the Xen virtual environment. It already works with Solaris, Linux and FreeBSD. Di Leo claims that ZXTM inspects packets on your local network, understands the business logic they entail and routes them to the appropriate server. It also off-loads other servers from Secure Sockets Layer and XML processing for faster application response. ZXTM comes as either software or an appliance. Pricing starts at $5,700.