Get your act together
AMBER AND HER twin sister took a trip last weekend, so it was just me and the pooch. A little peace and quiet never hurt anybody, after all. And having Apache around to keep me company was great. He was right there with me when I wanted to stay up late watching old movies, and then sleep in the next morning.
Web services clues
My spies have been busy being Web services private eyes, and I must say, they came across some very interesting clues. For starters, Sun Microsystems may be having trouble getting its Web services act together, but Sun CTO Greg Papadouplis knows a good thing when he sees it. He’s an investor in FirstRain, a startup that leverages Web services for business process integration.
Next, J.D. Edwards in June will become the first enterprise application vendor to fully embrace Web services, in contrast to the limited support planned by SAP and Oracle.
Meanwhile, Epic Realm, which provides an appliance for accelerating content, expects to help solve the Web services latency problem with the addition of SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) transaction caching capability later this year.
Finally, BindView in the third quarter will address the other Web services missing link and roll out a suite of applications for managing security around Microsoft .Net.
Where is iPlanet?
One of my spies reported that iPlanet’s customer support folks have not been up to par since being swallowed up by Sun. Said spy called Sun with a question about iPlanet Directory Server, only to be promised a callback that never came. After contacting Sunstore, my spy was told to call a “special” number for iPlanet — but it rang and rang, and no one answered.
Spam scam
Another spy said that someone has snuck into PayPal’s business base recently by way of a scam that is circulating via e-mail. The message appears to be an e-mail coming from PayPal.com urging users to click a link that looks like a legitimate URL with a genuine PayPal page behind it. But when my spy got there, the “log-in” form on their page submits to a phony server where the company could be collecting personal information without PayPal knowing it.
AMBER CAME BACK in a funky mood. “It sure was nice to get out of the city. Did you miss me, Apache?” Amber asked, giving the dog a rub. “I missed you, in case you’re wondering,” she said to me. Geez.
