How do you connect a closed Windows application to a killer device such as the iPhone? Most would normally expect to have to alter the existing application adding APIs or even worse be forced down an upgrade path which costs 10 times more than you have available and takes 18 months to rollout.
With the launch of the OpenSpan Virtual Broker, you can now add Web Service wrappers to virtually any application and host them in a virtual (or physical if you like) environment. These services can then be accessed from anywhere, such as your portal environment (for customer self service) or directly from your other internal applications, even those hosted on a mobile device like the iPhone.
It's a simple drag and drop process to build a set of automations that integration my application(s) and then with the click of a button I can expose this functionality as a Web Service for any client to integrate.
Here at OpenSpan, we've just built a simple iPhone applications which calls a hosted service that allows a user to look-up contact information contained within a Windows fat client CRM system. If we'd wanted to create an API it would have involved getting the CRM vendor to upgrade our application, costing massive amounts and no doubt taking an age to be delivered.
This set of automations were built inside 1 day with the iPhone application taking a similar amount of time to put together - compared with a traditional approach - which one would you pick in today's market?
The iPhone application will be available soon in the App Store - I'll send out a link once it's live. In the meantime, if you want to be able to extend the life of those mission critical Windows applications, give OpenSpan a call.
