Remote App Testing Comes Home ...

Computerworld - ... for Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide Inc., which is in the first phase of automating software testing for remote users of its homegrown and commercial applications. According to Mark Badeau, manager for enterprise QA, his quality assurance team was "challenged by the testing environment." That's an understatement. Software that was created or integrated centrally at the White Plains, N.Y.-based company often was destined to operate remotely at one of the 750 properties in 80 countries that Starwood manages. Getting the end users to put the programs through their paces without major logistics hassles was a pain. Enter Austin-based Surgient Inc. Its VQMS technology lets remote users access and work with an application through a browser as if the code were running locally. Pam Thornton, Starwood's director of software engineering, says she "was comfortable working with a young company because they had seasoned folks who understood and leveraged best practices for testing." In addition to the remote user access, Badeau praises VQMS because it lets him provision a test machine and lock it down, run the tests and then automatically reset the system for the next operation. Reconfiguring and preparing a computer for a test once took hours but now takes just a moment or two, he says. Surgient CEO Bill Daniel says that later this year or early next, Starwood and others can use an upgraded VQMS with out-of-the-box integration with testing tools from Seque Software Inc., IBM's Rational division and Mercury Interactive Corp. Pricing starts at around $25,000. But think of the money you save by not having to reprovision machines for every test. And those hotel bills from end users visiting the testing center will disappear.

Apple's Resurgence in Life Sciences May ...
... polish its image for Wall Street IT users. That's a scenario painted by Jeff Augen, CEO of TurboWorx Inc. in Shelton, Conn. He contends that Apple Computer Inc.'s high-end Macs have "a technological head start" over Intel-based machines because they're fully 64-bit and "really, really fast." That head start appeals to organizations that demand high-performance, clustered systems. In the life sciences market, Augen foresees clusters of Macs (and Linux systems) using his company's TurboWorx Enterprise technology displacing multiprocessor Unix servers from Sun Microsystems Inc. and IBM. Michael Swenson, an analyst at Life Sciences Insights, an IDC company in Framingham, Mass., agrees. "We see an uptick in interest in Apple" among life sciences users, he says. But Augen thinks Apple might leverage one success for another. He claims that financial services companies with high-performance