Arbor - 1991 -> 1997
I was hired by Arbor specifically for my experience with XVT which, at the time, was the tool used to create the prototype Essbase (then un-named) front-end. At the time, OS/2 was used for both the server-side and client-side interfaces. Windows 3.0 was just released with 3.1 due shortly. I made the decision to drop XVT for client-side development and instead code directly to the Windows API.
At Arbor, I developed the spreadsheet interface software which used Excel and 123 as front-ends to Essbase. The first versions of the software used DDE to communicate with the respective spreadsheets. Subsequently, I created the "Common Spreadsheet Layer" (CSL) on the client-side and the spreadsheet-extractor on the server side to handle datbase queries. Performance quadrupled and spreadsheet integration was much tighter. A representitive of HP remarked that he "didn't know where Excel ended and Essbase began."
The CSL then became the basis for Arbor's first web product, the Essbase Web Gateway which I created in 1996, the bad-old days of the web. This product allowed users to perform financial analysis of their data using a web-browser (remember Netscape?).
While at Arbor, I worked on many projects large and small and managed several groups of engineers. It was a wild ride!