Today was the first day of CloudSlam. There have been a few nice presentations, but one of them really kicked it off: OpenSpan. Francis Carden showed a very cool demo of how to do application and workflow integration on the presentation layer. With a few mouse clicks he created an application that integrates a legacy Windows app with the FedEx Website; then he showed how to build an application that leverages the Salesforce API in combination with a legacy “MiniCRM”. Francis explained that OpenSpan is not just screen scraping but an intelligent combination of reverse-engineered operating system functions and usage of openly available APIs. Thereby, OpenSpan allows to integrate applications that otherwise would be costly to glue together. It reminded me a bit of Yahoo! Pipes, except that it is much cooler because it provides way better capabilities of creating and accessing external APIs / system processes. Have a look for yourself!
