At the last session of Prolifics University today, it was so exciting to hear about all the latest technologies.

As someone who sometimes builds situational applications, hearing Joe Lea talk about WebSphere sMash -- the outgrowth of IBM's Project Zero -- was particularly interesting. Based on Web 2.0 technologies, you can easily implement those smaller applications with some scripting and basic Web development skills. Provide blogs, forums, feeds and Google gadgets for collaboration and information sharing.

Complex business event processing was a continuation of yesterday's discussion about SOA monitoring. The advantage of WebSphere Business Events is that different kinds of business events--prospect deliveries, supply chain deliveries, web site visits, live chat conversations, calls to customer service, weather reports, and so on--that were previously unconnected, disparate items can now be correlated and evaluated so that the appropriate response can be taken. And, in another theme for the day, this can be done with a minimum of involvement from IT. Whether your interest is increasing your sales opportunities, fraud detection, or resource management, you can benefit from improvements in complex business event processing.

WebSphere Virtual Enterprise helps you use your resources more effectively. By combining Server Virtualization with Application Infrastructure Virtualization, organizations can achieve hardware and energy savings as well as reductions in maintenance costs and unplanned outages. With Application Infrastructure Virtualization, you separate applications from the physical infrastructure that they run on so that they can be placed or migrated across a pool of application server resources. By monitoring the health of your servers and defining health conditions and actions, you can prevent unplanned outages. By setting application service policies, you can ensure that the applications affecting your revenue are given the highest priority in system resources. And this type of efficiency is not just for larger organizations. Even with a small number of servers, you can still gain substantial financial benefits.

Tom Inman's presentation on Information On Demand gave those of us at Prolifics University a front row seat to IBM's recent announcements about an Information Agenda. In today's world, organizations are wanting to move beyond business automation to business optimization. Using information initiatives to help your business get the speed and flexibility that is needed in order to transform information into a trusted strategic asset that can give you a sustained competitive advantage.

If you were unable to join us for Prolifics University, replays will be available from the Prolifics University site at www.prolificsuniversity.com. Thanks to all of our customers and speakers for participating in a great week!