Beyond Virtualization?

At Open World, I talked with Mike Dayton from EPMCloud and he mentioned a new technology they are working with that effectively allows you to develop on the cloud and then painlessly move the application to an on-premises machine. Very intriguing!

Today, I got an email from Mike about an upcoming webinar on the technology which is from a company called AppZero. They claim to wrap an application, including all of the baseline OS settings, registry, directory and file settings in such a way that you can even move the application from one OS to another using drag-and-drop. If that works, this technology could be pretty cool. Want to try Essbase on Unix instead of Windows? Drag-and-drop it!

Who knows if it works that easily but I am going to try to catch the webcast scheduled for October 28th entitled 'Click to Move EPM Apps Between Cloud and Data Center With AppTransport'. You can get more info on the webcast at http://www.epmcloud.com/.

Dodeca Shines on the Clouds

This week was a big week for Dodeca on the cloud as there were three big cloud happening for us.

Thursday, Dodeca was featured in a public webcast hosted by EPMCloud.com and during the webcast, I demoed Dodeca running on an EPMCloud instance. We are planning to have this webcast on a regular basis. One unique thing about the cloud concept is that it also enables new and creative ways for interactive webcasts. Our friends at EPMCloud have asked if we would be interested in a Dodeca Hands-On Lab webcast where qualified participants would each get their own Dodeca cloud instance to work with. Would you be interested in participating in a Hands-On Lab? If so, contact EPMCloud and let them know! If you can't wait until then, you can request a EPMCloud Dodeca Sandbox on the website.

Another cloud partner, Full 360, also notified us that they are working on their first cloud-based Dodeca implementation. They share our vision of the availability of Dodeca on the cloud as an enabler for Essbase implementations at the tremendous amount of companies which were formerly considered too small for an Essbase application.

Finally, we worked with another traditional Hyperion partner this week to install Dodeca on one of their Amazon cloud instances for internal training purposes. I recently sat down for a couple of hours with some of their consultants and gave them a thorough demo of Dodeca's capabilities and, in particular, our workbook scripting functionality. Workbook script is essentially a codeless replacement for VBA. During that demo, I wowed them with the power of both workbook script and it's event model by showing them how they could implement a workbook script to dynamically format an Essbase adhoc report. Of course, that very exercise is impossible in Excel with either the classic Essbase Excel add-in or Smart View as they do not have, nor do I expect they will ever have, Essbase events. In workbook script, it was a five minute exercise. Look for an upcoming press release announcing this new partner along with a number of other partner announcements as well.