Groove is deepening its abilities by partnering with Casahl Technology to enable back-end enterprise integration. Read CNN news at http://www.crn.com/sections/breakingnews/dailyarchives.jhtml?articleId=23904843 for more info.

Now a number of years ago I contracted for Information Builders on the EDA product, which in-house was described as a glue because of its ability to take data from many back-end financial systems and bring it to the desktop. In those days the jargon was relational databases and 4GLs.

Well, it was a great contract - with some great times in New York, which was just fine and dandy for this Yorkshire Tike! I remember (very dimly - and not because of passage of time) being introduced to some heavy beers by one Alfonso. Wierd but great guy - I wish I had been able to keep in touch. His goal in getting be drunk was to see if he could get me (a vegetarian) to eat meat. I got as drunk as I can remember (?!?) and ate salad at one of New Yorks hottest meateries. Oops we are supposed to be talking computers... sorry for the digression...

Anyway beside different technology jargon their goal was bring hard numbers from financial databases and presenting these via their GUI to the "end-user". My role in this game was creating a comprehensive regression test harness from the GUI right back to the wide variety of Windows and Unix boxes, including boxes from locations across the globe. Great fun.

At the time their product was sort-of what Groove is today. Sort of. It did not operate at the Edge. It was not sexy. It required huge manpower and servers to justify its exicstence. And it cost loads-a-money. But it shared, sorry distribuuted, data around to their GUI "FOCUS" which was old fashioned even in those days: But the power of what it delivered in conjunction with their middleware EDA was - phenomenal - providing you are dealing with numbers.

And so today we see Groove moving into more structured and therefore harder forms of data - via their forms tool which has been signifincatly upgraded, and my guess will continue to be upgraded. It seems the Groove forms tool has probably had more visible effort put into it than any other tool in the Groove armoury. And now we begin to see the value of that investment bringing partnerships such as today's announcement.

posted by Andy Swarbrick/PopG at 18:12