Business Making Progress

What is RPM?

This week Progress Software end users and partners worldwide gathered in Boston to get some actionable insights that will help them lower costs, raise efficiency, improve customer experiences, and drive revenue. Our attendees have the ability to chose from over 100 sessions designed specifically for business and IT professionals. One of our breakouts is dedicated to Responsive Process Management (RPM) which is a topic we’ve been talking about a lot over the past year. The introduction of RPM has stimulated discussions around our hallways and within the industry on what RPM exactly is…

• Is RPM the Next-generation BPM?
• Is RPM a totally new and different concept?

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Below are two articles written by Daniel Schlosky. Dan is a technology writer with more than two decades of experience writing for companies like Sun Microsystems, Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Western Digital. He’s also written for publications such as Datamation, Silicon Strategies, and in-house publications for Hewlett-Packard and Texas Instruments.

Take a minute to look at both perspectives and TELL US WHAT YOU THINK!

To share your thoughts, click the Comments link below.

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BPM Is Still Evolving

In the early 1990s, the first Business Process Management (BPM) systems could track processes with only limited scaling and relatively few users. Adequate for tracking accounting or claims processes, they were not yet up to handling an entire company’s purchasing system that services tens of thousands of people. Since then, BPM has evolved into much more powerful and mature systems. They all now include process engines, process modeling, asset repositories, etc. Current large, robust enterprise BPM systems have great complexity and functionality, while web-based departmental BPM systems are usually simpler but still highly proficient.

Today’s BPM systems are extremely powerful and capable. They focus mainly on cutting costs by making companies more efficient through iterative, continuously improving processes. While BPM systems have come quite far, they are still advancing. Several new trends are making them even more powerful and useful.  

One new trend that goes beyond cost cutting is finding new revenue sources. For example, Progress BPM enabled an airline to expand its revenue stream by building an application to connect to alliance partner airlines. The customer, after paying a small insurance fee, is assured that if a flight cancellation occurs, the airline will automatically rebook him/her on the next alliance partner’s flight. It would also automatically change hotel reservations, cancel and rebook rental cars, etc. Happy customers are now saved from the hassle of rescheduling everything themselves – and the airline adds to its bottom line.

A second important trend is including complex event processing in BPM systems. With this capability, managers can monitor streams of activities such as stock market transactions, airline scheduling, and communications ordering systems. One basically searches for patterns and anomalies within those patterns. Although some other BPM systems may also deal with events, Progress BPM, when combined with the company’s Apama business event processing (BEP) platform, sets it apart in both power and performance.

A third new trend is the mobility enablement of BPM systems. These systems can now interconnect with intelligent handheld devices to speed up handling tasks with greater user convenience. For a BPMS process tracking purchase requests and approvals, managers can now actually respond to them on their iPods or blackberries without having to fully log onto financial applications on their laptops. This new mobile capability both simplifies the approval process and saves time.

Yet another significant new trend is enabling greater collaboration, especially in process modeling. Coupled with the new mobility, this is an even stronger improvement. The objective is to have managers in different locations review and provide input for the process model and simulation. Having this collaborative capability in the process planning stages is a major benefit.

These four innovations of the latest BPM systems – finding new revenue sources, events processing, enabling mobility and facilitating collaboration – are the leading new trends in the ongoing evolution of BPM. 

 

The Progress® RPM Suite – Is It Really About BPM?

What exactly is Responsive Process Management (RPM)? Is it a natural extension of BPM, or a totally new and different concept? Analysts and customers generally agree that RPM is an evolution of high-end BPM Gartner talks about Intelligent Business Operations as a development from BPM for responsive operations. Forrester refers to Business Transformation and IDC to Decision Management as expansions of BPM. Others, mainly business rather than technology professionals, see RPM as a completely new domain, one with greater ROI and faster time to value.

A recent Vanson Bourne independent research study found that most businesses are unable to respond to market or customer changes quickly enough to be competitive. RPM triumphs over this challenge with a very high level of operational responsiveness – the ability to sense and respond to changing conditions and customer interactions as they occur. If not totally new, RPM raises its responses to a whole new level of power and possibility. Savvion BPM is an integral part of Progress’ RPM Suite, but so are the company’s Apama business event processing (BEP) platform and Actional business transaction management (BTM) solution. To cap these three systems, the Suite adds its new groundbreaking Progress Control Tower, a first-of-its kind interactive business control panel that ties the three systems together for unprecedented responsiveness capabilities.

The Control Tower is the central RPM control point for

• Modeling and simulating processes
• Automatic documenting of processes
• Drilling down and analyzing information
• Cross-collaborating with team members
• Taking corrective steps as needed
• Continuously improving processes
• Reducing risk

So with all this said, which is it – a natural evolution of BPM or a totally new concept? Convincing arguments can be made for each view. If it’s an extension of BPM, it goes much further by adding real-time, end-to-end visibility into events and applications; enabling immediate response to situations when they arise; allowing users to capitalize on opportunities; and empowering business users with greater control for continuous business improvement.

What do you think? To share your thoughts, click the Comments link below.

 

Introducing SupportLink - Our New Customer Support Portal

Progress Customer Support is now Progress SupportLink!  And it’s not just about a new name – it’s about several new features that make it easier for you to manage support cases and engage resources.  It’s about getting even more responsive award-winning support – from self-service searches to telephone support, giving you the right solutions to your issues quickly and effectively.

From easier management of cases, to stream-lined communications, to faster answers, you are going to like Progress SupportLink!  Check out an overview, complete with informational video and FAQ online!

You may have already pre-registered and received your login credentials – if so, get started here!  Or if you need to create your account, it only takes a couple of minutes to register.

 

Do you know Dr. John Bates?

If you don’t, get to know him. Though not a native of Massachusetts, it’s safe to say, “he’s wicked smaaht”. Not only is he smart, he’s really a genuine, nice person.  Recently, Dr. John Bates was named as one of the Top 10 Innovators of the Decade for Capital Markets, in which he has an extensive background. He helped pioneer new techniques in algorithmic and high frequency trading, real-time risk, and market surveillance. He was also a co-founder of Apama, a complex event processing (CEP) technology provider that Progress Software acquired in 2005.

Last year John became a member of the newly established Technology Advisory Committee (TAC) for the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The CFTC is an independent agency with the mandate to regulate commodity futures and options markets in the United States. Most recently, he joined the blog roll over at the Huffington Post – his most recent post is From Icebergs to Autos, Effects of the Japan Earthquake Are Long-Lasting.

If you haven’t already, get to know John. I promise you, he’s a man worth knowing professionally, and if you are lucky, personally.

• Follow him on Twitter (@drjohnbates)
• See if he’ll confirm you as a friend on Facebook
• Watch him on YouTube
• Read what he has to say on our Apama and Business Making Progress blogs
• Listen to his CNBC interview Is a 'Splash Crash' Next?
• Check out his Executive Profile on Boston Business Journal

Forrester Recognizes Progress Sonic As A Leader in the ESB Market

Did you know that Progress® Sonic® was the industry's first Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)? It was, however, introduced in 2002 by Sonic Software which was an independent operating company of Progress Software Corporation.

In April independent research firm Forrester Research, Inc. named Progress Software as a leader in “The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Service Bus, Q2 2011” report. In this detailed review of Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) providers, Progress Sonic ESB was recognized with particularly high scores for its ESB architecture, orchestration as well as change and control capabilities. The report also gave Sonic ESB high scores for product strategy and strategic alliances, while also scoring the product highly for its large customer install base.

Strategic businesses worldwide have made Sonic ESB a core component to their service-oriented architecture (SOA). A few of these companies include British Airways, Royal Dirkzwager, AutoTrader, and most recently UK-based PD Ports. Why did they choose Progress? Because Sonic ESB delivers the best overall combination of architecture, orchestration, mediation, connection as well as change and control features. It helps them achieve the business and operational responsiveness they need to be successful.

Cruise past your competition and make sure your integrated infrastructure is powered by the 1st and best ESB... Sonic ESB. If you are interested in the report, click here. It will be available FREE FROM REGISTRATION for the next five business days only. What a deal! ;-)

Feel free to also share your ESB integration and deployment experiences here.

An Algorithmic Trading and Market Surveillance Wrap Up

Our Capital Markets and Progress Apama teams have been BUSY! Today many of them are recovering from a busy week at the SIFMA Financial Services Technology Expo in New York City.

In addition to lots of greeting and Tweeting, Dan Hubscher even had some time to post a couple blog posts:

• Tickets Please: Technology to Keep You on the Train
• Keeping the Train on Track

And while Dan helped man the floor, our VP of Corporate Communications, John Stewart, worked to get 3 press releases out onto the BusinessWire, including:

• Progress Software and Activ Financial Introduce New Market Data Adapter for Apama Capital Markets Foundation
• Progress Software Survey Reveals the Realities of Regulation, Monitoring and Algorithms on the OTC Derivatives Market
• Progress Software Launches Enhanced Market Surveillance and Monitoring Solution

Not only that, our own Dr. John Bates was tagged by Wall Street & Technology as one of our "Top 10 Innovators of the Decade for Capital Markets”.

Across the pond and beyond, Dr. Richard Bentley was quoted in the Bobsguide article “Suspect movements in share price fall to an eight-year low”. Dr. Giles Nelson traveled to India to promote Progress’ business in Capital Markets. He shared his thoughts on our complex event processing (apama.typepad.com) blog:

• The rise of algo trading in Asia - first stop Mumbai
• Still big room for growth in Japan

Phew! And, just in case you missed it, we wrapped up posting a 4 Part video series on Financial Regulation and Market Surveillance. Here are the blog posts that provide a brief overview and link to the videos:

• PLUS Stock Exchange Making Progress Around Regulation
• Using technology to prepare for regulatory change: how can market surveillance technologies help?
• Preparing for changes in the regulatory approach
• Cutting through the confusion of financial regulation

 

Dr. Ketabchi Reveals Secret Sauce of BPM

Are you a business or IT person who wants to... Reduce costs? Improve quality? Manage exceptions? Increase revenue? Most likely, it's all of the above.

Dr. M.A. Ketabchi, Chief Strategist at Progress Software, presented at the Gartner BPM Summit in March on how you can increase your business operations IQ.  He explains how you can run your operations more intelligently, and he reveals:

• The “secret sauce” of business process management
• Well-known companies that have benefitted from BPM, and how they did so
• How business event processing (often referred to as Complex Event Processing (CEP)) enhances BPM
• Typical business challenges that require a combination of BPM and BEP
• How Progress® Responsive Process Management (RPM) brings it all together

If you are interested in the replay, click here. It will be available FREE FROM REGISTRATION for the next five business days only. What a deal! ;-)

Hope you enjoy it. And, as always, make sure to share your feedback and comments here.

Changing an airplane engine while in flight

There were some words we heard over and over again throughout yesterday’s 11th annual financial and industry analyst event in New York City. Those words were: “easy”, “fast time to market”, “visibility” and “leverage” and they were spoken by all of our attending customers (and even some who weren’t there via video).

The Progress Analyst Day, attended by some 80 analysts from many of the most respected firms in the US and EMEA, focused on responsiveness and how we at Progress Software can assist our customers achieve the goals they describe using these words.

First: “easy”. The world has changed; few business executives today want to spend time and money developing software that will need to be supported and changed continually in order to keep up with an evolving competitive landscape.

There is a widespread aversion to inflexible packaged applications. As Liam Hudson, M.D, Global Head of FX Ecommerce at Bank of America Merrill Lynch put it: “We are not an IT shop. Spending time on IT is a distraction for us. Alpha generation is the only bit we want to write ourselves.”

Second: “fast time to market”. Ozlem Demirboga, Head of Customer iInformation Management at mobile communication services, Turkcell, said: “Fast time to market is important. It has to be quick and easy for us to create new location-based campaigns.”

Jim Winburn, CTO at clinical research organization, PRA International, agreed and noted that speed to development would help his firm to drive new drugs to market faster. As did Julian Self, CIO at commercial real estate analysis firm, IPD. According to Julian his clients’ performance (and bonuses) depends on IPD gathering, analyzing and reporting back - as it happens.

Third: “visibility”. Seeing business processes from a high level, in a single view is a common goal. Eric Gooley, Head of Business Process Engineering, Operational Reporting and Metrics at communications firm, Level(3), said: “With the increased visibility we now have we can drill down to director and manager level and hold them accountable for bottlenecks and processing issues.”

Demirboga simply wants to be able to see if Turkcell’s location-based sales campaigns are getting results, and: “to make sure the system is working.”

And finally: “leverage”. Rip and replace, the act of starting over completely, is no longer an option. The complexity of IT infrastructure differs from industry to industry and firm to firm. What they have in common is that they need to keep the technology they have built or bought already; it is part of the business, often critical, and expensive.

Progress customers want to keep most of what they have, to continue to use the technology and leverage that investment, while adding technology that can sit on top of it and bring in quantifiable results.

As Progress President and CEO, Rick Reidy said in answer to a question posed: “You can justify the investment by extracting greater value from legacy systems for exponential return.”

When you put our customers words together they go a long way in describing our vision for Responsive Process Management (RPM). It leverages existing software, avoiding costly rip and replace strategies; provides easy-to-use visibility into all of your business processes; and offers quick time to market for initial deployment and on-the-fly changes.

Julian Self likened RPM to an airline engineering team replacing an engine - not using RPM is like trying to switch out the engines while flying. We like that analogy.

SOA. It’s back… but it’s got more sparkle.

I’ve been working in high-tech marketing roles for over 20 years now and every time some new marketing collateral comes across my desk and “I get it”, I get excited. As a matter of fact, my first job in a high tech company was as a marketing assistant to an R&D group at BBN Systems and Technologies. They were introducing a very innovative product called BBN Slate which was a multi-media editor for Unix. Because my previous jobs involved word processing (Wang), spreadsheet analysis (Lotus), and creating pretty charts (DEC/VMS – yes, really), “I got it” and I was committed to championing it. I loved every minute of it. Well, in 2007 I was tasked to optimize the Progress Software website for SOA. We already had great traction for the enterprise service bus (ESB), but not specifically for service-oriented architecture (SOA). Well, “I got it”, got going and started optimizing for SOA Infrastructure – a popular long tail term at the time - less than two months later. As a matter of fact, this blog was once the SOA Infrastructure blog.

In January of 2009, Anne Thomas Manes of the Burton group published the blog post SOA is Dead; Long Live Services. The industry had a lot of fun with that. Now, I don’t know if it was a coincidence, but suddenly Progress stopped talking about SOA and they asked me to change the name of this blog. I was sad, I admit it.

This responsive business integration diagram was taken from a presentation by Hub Vandervoort, CTO, Enterprise Infrastructure. Listen to the archive.

Well yesterday I saw some sparkle. We announced our new Responsive Business Integration (RBI) suite. Truth be told, I’ve known about it for a few months because I had to post the content and work on my SEO plan. I know it’s not nice to play favorites, but I was delighted to see my favorite Progress technology/products back in the game – Actional, DataXtend SI and Sonic. And, I’ve concluded that the RBI suite is SOA pimped up! It’s taking the existing service and application foundation most enterprises already have (or are building) and it’s enhancing it with semantics, policy management and mediation. The Progress RBI suite is going to allow businesses to decouple systems which will give them improved visibility, agility and the ability to change.

Read more about Progress Responsive Business Integration. And check out a great presentation by Progress customer Southern Union Company. They built their enterprise integration strategy around RBI and didn't even know it.

For the lack of a better term, do you think RBI it is our next-generation SOA? Give us your comments!

Real-time Visibility Will Help You Make Better Decisions

Decision management expert James Taylor believes it’s really very simple… to succeed, you need to sense and respond to what’s going on in your business, in your systems, and all around you. He’s right. In my job, I need to be alerted immediately when the website is down. Now, we aren’t saving lives here at Progress Software (although I’d like to think that applications using our software and technology are) but our website is core to our business. If our site goes down, it will result in poor customer or visitor experiences which translates to lost revenue. What I need, IT are you listening?, is a notification service that alerts me the SECOND the site fails. If I had that, I could respond quicker and make sure that IT was working to get it back up. If I had that, I could also plan and make decisions on how I would respond to my frantic boss, the irritated visitor, and the customer support rep who just lost his/her web app right in the middle of a troubleshooting session or order process.

Anyone else know my pain?

Now, we all know that my wish is doable because it’s relatively simple, but for many businesses, their business events and processes are much more complex and the consequences of process failure are much more severe. I think it’s pretty clear that in order for us to make fast decisions, we need to begin by gaining visibility into our business processes. The Progress Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite is all about giving you the operational tools and business control panels you need to be responsive to changing conditions.

So, what's the next logical step for you? Learn a bit more about the first component to building the responsive enterprise that lets you make smarter decisions - achieving real-time visibility. Listen to James Taylor’s 3-minute visibility podcast – the 1st in a series of 4 podcasts. Not only will you hear how you can achieve real-time visibility but you’ll learn how the Progress® Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite can help.

If you are interested in reading more, register to download the companion white paper Building Responsive Enterprises: One Decision at a Time.

Episode1: Visibility

Or listen via player:

Sharing some winter sun with Progress' application partners

Earlier this week I participated in the 2011 Progress Global Partner Conference which was held in Florida.

This is only the second time the partner conference has been global – previously it was held regionally – and I’m delighted to say that hundreds of representatives from business partners attended from all over the world.

Most of the partners present were what Progress terms application partners – those that have used Progress products to build applications that are then sold to end-users. As always, the sheer diversity of the applications partners create and sell is mind-boggling – from healthcare apps specialising in kidney treatment to point-of-sale retail systems deployed in 25,000 outlets worldwide to location-based content delivery platforms. Progress recognises the many varied achievements of its partners with its very own awards ceremony. The winners can be found here. And, yes, it is a tiny bit like the Golden Globes, although without the acerbic wit of Ricky Gervais.

These partners continue to be incredibly important to Progress Software. Supporting them with product innovation as well as facilitating new ways for them to deploy their applications (for example by testing out their applications in the cloud with Progress Arcade) is a key pillar of Progress’ strategy. Another strategic pillar is Responsive Process Management (RPM), launched by Progress to the market in 2010, and several sessions in the conference were dedicated to explaining how RPM fitted into the partners’ world. Adoption of RPM in the partner community is happening. An example of this is Skyward, school management software supplier, recently announcing their use of Progress’ OpenEdge BPM platform. This puts them on the first step to full RPM adoption.

John Rymer from Forrester Research, the software analysts, also addressed the conference. Amongst other topics, he talked about four big “on-ramps” of new functionality – business process management, analytics, business events, and collaboration. These, he believed, were the most effective ways for software vendors (Progress’ partners in this case) to deliver new functionality fast and will be the key technologies behind many of the next generation software platforms. Forrester’s presence at a Progress partner conference was timely. Recently one of their analysts, Mike Gaultieri, blogged about Java, despite being more popular than ever, being a “dead end” for enterprise application development. He encouraged developers to consider alternatives, including Progress OpenEdge, that offer substantially higher productivity. It was a reminder that OpenEdge remains as relevant as ever and is a great aid in application modernization. Further output on this topic from Forrester is imminent.

All in all, it was a successful, high-energy conference. Many thanks to all the partners who came, and to those that didn’t, please try and make it in 2012!

 

 

Take Control of Your Business with RPM

Achieving the ability to gain real-time visibility, immediately sense and respond, and continuously improve business processes are the core benefits of responsive process management, but what makes the Progress® Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite so powerful is the Progress Control Tower™ - a unified, interactive business control panel that gives users the tools they need to view what is happening within their business and the ability to improve it.

Dr. John Bates, Chief Technology Officer at Progress Software

In Part 7 of our 7 part video series, Take Control of Your Business, John talks briefly about the how the Progress Control Tower not only gives our customers visibility into their complex events but it also allows them to set up business rules and alerts so that they can continually change and evolve how their business processes operate. Click here to learn more about Progress Control Tower.

Interested in hearing what industry analysts are saying about operational responsiveness? Watch the 3-minute teaser, Gain Efficiency. Avoid Risk. Seize Opportunity, by Gartner analyst Roy Schulte, and then download the entire video. You may also be interested in the paper Building Responsive Enterprises: One Decision at a Time written by industry analyst James Taylor.

Enjoy past videos of this seven part series:

What Is Operational Responsiveness?
Why Is Operational Responsiveness So Hard To Achieve?
Delivering Operational Responsiveness
Four Types of Business Process Visibility
Immediate Sense and Respond
Continuous Process Improvement

Mary Szekely: A Progress Software Original

It’s not very often that an original employee sticks around for 30 years, however, Mary Szekely (pronounce C-K per the Hungarian origins of the name) is that very person at Progress Software. A software engineer and fellow at the company, Mary is one of the initial four employees at Progress and one of the first fearless females to enter the male-dominated field of software development. I recently had an opportunity to talk one-on-one with Mary and below is a summary of our conversation.

Q: What was it like when you first started at Progress?

Mary: When we started out there were three engineers and one person who focused on the business side of things. That person was Joe Alsop who then became CEO. The other two engineers, besides me, were Clyde Kessel and Chip Ziering. Clyde and Chip concerned themselves with the database part of the product and I took care of the compiler and run-time part of the product and... it was just a lot of fun. We were in a dentist's office in Billerica, MA. The roof leaked. We had what was then a novelty - a wireless phone. I would answer the phone, "Data Language Corporation, may I direct your call?” and pass the call to whoever was ready to act the part of President. I had four young children at home so it was a little scary to work at a place where I was not sure of any future or salary, but it was exciting beyond any belief.

Q. What did it mean to be a woman in the software industry 30 years ago?

Mary: There were few women. Actually, when I went to school, which was long before that, in the 50s and early 60s, I was the only woman in many of my college classes. I was taking engineering, math and computing classes. Math was my passion and computers were a way to solve intractable math problems, and that’s what got me excited about computers.

Q. What has kept you at Progress for so long?

Mary: The variety in the job. I'm still working on the compiler, and the language, and the runtime, just like I was back then, but it's all different now. Back then, you were working on a machine that had 256K of memory, floppy disks and no hard drive. To back up the product, we had to insert the floppy in the drive to copy the code then switch floppies to back it up because 256K was too little capacity to copy the whole thing. We took turns every night to go through the backup process. Nothing like today when some automatic system backs our data up somewhere in the cloud.

Q. What was your goal as a startup company?

Mary: Clyde and Chip were the best of breed of the engineers from MIT. We were experts on databases and compilers and we knew exactly what we wanted to do, which was to build a serious database product on what was then called “micro-computers” (now known as personal computers.) That’s how Chip, Clyde and Joe decided to formally found the company as Data Language Corporation on December 29, 1981. After 18 months, we had a product, RDL [what does it stand for?], now known as OpenEdge.

Q. What was your first big commercial success?

Mary: We sold a source license to ADR (Applied Data Research) in 1984 for $2M. They had a mainframe database system that was very popular at the time and they needed a personal computer version of it. They didn’t even want to think about building it themselves, so they came to us after seeing us at a Comdex show. They rebranded it as “PC Ideal” but their product didn’t sell very well because they didn’t understand the PC market. Ours on the other hand was doing great and one year later, we sold a second license to NCR for another $2M. Receiving that first $2M check from ADR is my most memorable moment at Progress. I will never forget that. That was like, you hit it. In fact, you hit it big.

Q. What differentiated Progress from its competitors back then?

Mary: Our goal was to do a very robust system that you could run a business with but at the same time, we wanted it to be easy to use. Everybody in the world at that time was scrambling around trying to get database software out for the banks and other businesses to use on their mainframes. By contrast, we wanted to supply it on this new platform, the PC, and we wanted it to be simple and easy, which is something no other company - I can say that, no other company struggled as hard as we did to achieve. That's always been our struggle and it continues to be today. We wanted our customers to not only have their problem solved, but to have it done as simply as humanly possible.

Q: How have the key technology breakthroughs from the past 30 years impacted you as a developer?

Mary: The key event that started the company was the very existence of personal computers with their 256K memory and little floppy disk that let us save our software. We then had our first hard drives, which allowed us to write more code. In the mid-80s, we got homogeneous networking that allowed systems to talk to each other within a vendor’s network. This was our first client/server networked configuration. But it’s when TCP/IP appeared that we really took off. We went through a whole period in the 80s where we were the only company that had a database product that worked across heterogeneous networks. Our database became one of the safest with the highest availability on the market. At that time, all I worked on was networking. I had cables all over my office. Then machines kept getting smaller, but much faster, with dramatically more memory and disk space. This allowed databases to grow much larger, which eventually led to 64-bit addressing. In early 2000, we went to a three-tiered architecture with a server, a thick application server client and a thin client. A lot of dramatic changes that required re-architecting again and again.

Q. How have you been able to keep up with all these changes?

Mary: We have gradually brought people on board who have been mentored until they understand the architecture well while becoming an expert at a particular section of the code. Mentoring is about keeping our code alive. We control the code through the expertise that is progressively developed and maintained over the years. Therefore when a paradigm shift occurs, like now with cloud computing, we can get our millions of lines of code to react faster. I have mentored very many engineers over the years, concentrating on keeping the code alive and capable of servicing our customers in the best possible way. It's fun to work with a lot of smart people.

Q. How do you think Progress has grown to what it is today?

Mary: Every single person who works here works really hard and they do their job well. I'm talking about people in your department as well as mine. It's the only way you stay alive for 30 years. Every single person has to do the best that they can, every day, without supervision, just because out of their heart they want to do the best job that they know how to. And to me that's what defines a Progress employee. Every time I get to talk to them I commend them for being very faithful to our work ethic. I've never found an engineer at Progress that just doesn’t care.

Q. What is your current role?

Mary: I'm working on the cloud computing multi-tenancy. We're modifying OpenEdge so that one database can serve many customers while keeping the data protected from each other. I work on the client side, like I always have.

Q. Where would you like to see Progress 30 years from now?

Mary: I would like to continue to see satisfied customers who become stunningly successful thanks to us; and happy employees. If we really work at trying to make these two things happen, we will be successful and we will last another 30 years and more.

Happy New Year from Progress Software!

The Best of Progress Software 2010 Resources

I admit it... I'm not a big fan new years. Not only does it remind me that I have two to three months of dark days and blistering cold to contend with (I'm a New Englander) but I'm always a little apprehensive about what the new year will bring. One of the things I do like are all the "year in reviews" and "best of" stuff  - music countdowns, celebrity best & worst dressed, sports action highlights, etc. So in the spirit of the new year, I've put together my list of the Progress Software resources our website visitors found most interesting... or in most casese viewed the most. ;-)

LIMITED TIME OFFER! Enjoy most of the resources below without registration until January 15th. That's right, all you have to do is click.

• #1 downloaded white paper: Guide to Process Rules
  This white paper compares the conventional business rule techniques with the process-centric business rule paradigm. Included is a breakdown of an example business rule. You'll also get a detailed description of the three inter-related categories of business rules.
• #1 viewed article: Keeping a Watchful Eye on the Markets
  This article presents thoughts on how nosiness and surveillance can pay off but the fix may not be more rules and regulations. This article was written by Dr. Giles Nelson and published by TABBFORUM.
• Most viewed YouTube video: Credit card and fraud detection. Agent O has it covered!
  It may seem like just another day at the banking operations center, but Agent O senses trouble and is alerted of unusual patterns of credit card activity. Can the Progress® Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite help him stop the crime in time? Watch this YouTube video.
• #1 replayed webinar: Introducing the DataXtend SID Model Browser
  This webinar provides an overview and tutorial of the major features of the SID Model Browser, including a live demo of the software. You will learn how to explore the domains and classes of the SID, understand the SID model hierarchy, search the SID model, and generate HTML reports in support of OSS/BSS integration projects that are using the SID.
• Most read blog post: It's About Quality... End-to-End Process Quality
  Read this blog post and learn more about our launch of our Progress® RPM suite.
• #1 downloaded E-book (or primer): Complex Event Processing
  Read the abridged version of a new book co-authored by K. Mani Chandy & W. Roy Schulte, and learn how you can improve situational awareness & adapt quickly to consumer demands.
• Most popular Analyst Report: Gartner MQ 2010 - Application Performance Monitoring (sorry you need to register for this one)
  Download this analyst report and see how vendors stack up. You'll also get access to an Infographic (created by Progress) that shows what makes our performance monitoring approach unique and effective.
• #1 software download: Sonic Evaluation (sorry you need to register for this one)
  Download an evaluation of the industries first and most popular enterprise service bus (ESB).
• #1 downloaded data sheet: Sonic ESB
  Learn more about our messaging-based enterprise service bus that simplifies the integration and re-use of business applications within a service-oriented architecture (SOA).
• Most popular brochure: Responsive Process Management (RPM) Brochure
  Operational responsiveness enables businesses like yours to achieve a higher level of business performance. This brochure provides an in-depth description of the features and benefits of the Progress® Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite.

If you'd like to learn more or download other resources, visit www.progress.com, and please don't hesitate to contact us any time.

If a Customer Tweets into the Ether, Do They Make a Sound?

As you may have read in yesterday's post, we hosted our final Progress Software Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday. We again heard from the venerable, John Rymer of Forrester Research. In his speech, “Design Solutions for Faster Change and Greater Business Impact” he touched more strongly this time on the concept of customer service as it relates to real-time business event processing.

We have previously cited his example of Maytag responding to mommy blogger Dooce’s issues with the company’s product and subsequent public ribbing of the company via social media channels. This was a great example of reacting to a customer, one empowered by their own online reputation and influence, to the best outcome for all parties involved. Yesterday, however, John gave some examples of companies who are not only reactive but also proactive in how they approach customer service issues via social media, the ultimate in real-time dialogue with consumers.

In keeping with our summit series’ central topic, how businesses can become more operationally responsive, John discussed how empowering employees to solve problems sans red tape is important. He brought up the example of Best Buy’s Twitter team that is able to answer product queries, solve problems, and rectify direct criticisms / customer aggression in real-time mitigating the risk of a decline in brand sentiment and loyalty with every happy or at least satiated customer with whom they interact.

With more and more channels through which customers can complain and a decreasing reliance on traditional customer service lines and email aliases that long go unresponded to, the masses are taking to channels like Twitter forcing organizations to respond in new ways as well as make decisions about issues faster and more efficiently than ever before.

Overall, attendees left thinking about how they see and respond to business issues in new ways from every speaker. From John though they also left with new places to take long hard looks at in planning their customer service efforts.

Talking about Twitter... take a minute to follow me, John R. Rymer, and Progress Software.

The Economy, Business Environments... It’s all Responsiveness to Us

Yesterday’s Progress Software Summit in San Francisco was capped off with a presentation that was a true highlight from our responsive process management Summit tour of the past few weeks – a visit from Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard.

Rich wasted no time in getting right down to business, and delved right into current economic issues and how the relationship between the GDP and aggregate demand show that the country appears to have another two or three years left of this “flat growth.” He took this opportunity to discuss the economic headwinds and tailwinds of this recession. For starters, the headwinds such as residential and commercial real estate numbers dwindling and small business expansion decreasing were signs of trouble that we are facing. However, on the positive, tailwind side of the coin, the global economy outside of the US and Western Europe is strong, the stock market is steadily increasing, interest rates are at all time lows and there are many global companies that have a lot of cash on their balance sheets.

Karlgaard expressed that the economy faces an incredible amount of different variables every day, and, whether positive or negative, they will occur and are therefore accepted as certainties. Businesses, much like the economy in Rich’s explanation, face a similar environment of new and fluctuating variables with customers voicing their concerns on social media channels, regulations constantly changing and employees communicating on powerful mobile devices.

Businesses should accept that these new events are here to stay, and the ability to sense and respond to them as they occur will be crucial in their crusade to succeed. The world, whether in business, economics or other arenas, is getting smaller and faster, and in the coming years, becoming increasingly operationally responsive will be what separates success and failure.

Mr. Spock, a duck, and the Maytag Repairman…

You may be asking yourself what these three names have in common and we found out at the Progress Software Summit on responsive process management in New York City yesterday.

Following Larry Kudlow’s speech the audience heard from Progress Software CEO, Rick Reidy, yours truly, and Forrester analyst John R. Rymer. What we heard from Rymer repeatedly was that business event processing is the next big architecture movement. He argued that a company’s responsiveness was based on its ability to empower its people to be responsive through the elimination of restrictive policies and regulations. The use case of this was the interaction between influential mommy blogger Dooce and Maytag – with hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers, Dooce became an “empowered customer” whom Maytag could not and would not ignore when it came to responding to her gripes about her new washer. Being able to respond quickly and nimbly, without months of red tape allowed Maytag to weather what could have been a scathing PR debacle.

Rymer was also uniquely able to discuss Hans Solo and Captain Kirk as the intuitive business users in comparison to Mr. Spock and Obi Wan Kenobi who represented analytical business users. While a big hit with this tech-heavy crowd, this analogy also served to reinforce my discussion at the need to cater to pure business users, business analysts as well as IT. All organizations have Kirks and Spocks.

This all tied nicely back to the analogy that started our day that came from our CEO, Rick Reidy. If you and your competitors are ducks in a pond, who is the leader and who simply follows the flock? In order to be a leader one must be able to just nearly see the future or, at the very least, not drive in the rearview mirror. The idea that responsive process management, business event processing and, more basically, seeing and responding in a timely way can make you that leading duck was an easy to digest message that rang true for everyone who made it out to today’s Progress Software Summit.

Afterwards... it was off to Chicago!

Encouraging Eventful Entrepreneurs

Our Progress Software Summit kicked off this week at the Hudson Hotel in New York City with a keynote address from CNBC’s Larry Kudlow, “From Washington to Wall Street.” Kudlow dove right into the dominant headline-grabber of the day – the mid-term elections. Larry used the elections as a springboard to touch upon his thoughts on economic policy, politics and other current events.

He then hit on several hot button issues of today, including the emergence of the Tea Party and Sarah Palin, his opinions on the oil and banking industries, as well as his thoughts on corporate tax policies and how they impact a key audience – entrepreneurs.

An overarching theme that we took from his speech is that entrepreneurs can learn from successes as well as failures, and this idea is not that different from business processes and event processing. When entrepreneurs launch a new company and it fails, it is not necessarily a disappointment, just as long as that business-person evaluates and applies what occurred. Then, when they take a risk with another launch, they will have learned from the events and processes that they faced the first time around, such as choosing that first employee, purchasing office space or accepting outside funding. These business risk takers can discover new paths and options from these previous situations, analyze them based upon their actions in the past and use this knowledge to catapult their latest business into a success. If such activity is encouraged, entrepreneurs will become responsive to the steps it takes to jumpstart a business, and ultimately turn those letdowns into triumphs.

A big thank you to Larry for taking the time to speak with our attendees and answer their questions after his speech! Follow Larry Kudlow on Twitter.

Sense and Respond to Event Streams in Real Time

Last week we introduced one of the key benefits of  responsive process management (RPM) - real time visibility. We've heard what it means to be operationally responsiveness, why it's so hard to achieve and how we deliver it through the Progress RPM® suite. Today we'll look at another key benefit of RPM – the ability to immediately sense and respond to business events so that you can quickly reveal opportunities, threats or inefficiencies, and take action.

Dr. John Bates, Chief Technology Officer at Progress Software

In Part 5 of our 7 part video series, Immediate Sense and Respond, John talks about the how one of today’s smart technologies, complex event processing (CEP), allows businesses to process event feeds and have the ability to sense and respond to the opportunities, or threats, that occur in real time. A good example of how CEP benefits companies is in fraud prevention.

The best part? You drive. A business control panel will give you the ability to gain real-time visibility into business events, immediately sense and respond to changing conditions, and achieve continuous process improvement. Learn how Agent O applies RPM to tackle credit card fraud in real time.

Interested in hearing what industry analysts are saying about operational responsiveness? Watch the 3-minute teaser, Gain Efficiency. Avoid Risk. Seize Opportunity, by Gartner analyst Roy Schulte, and then download the entire video. You may also be interested in the paper Building Responsive Enterprises: One Decision at a Time written by industry analyst James Taylor.

Enjoy past videos of this seven part series:

What Is Operational Responsiveness?
Why Is Operational Responsiveness So Hard To Achieve?
Delivering Operational Responsiveness
Four Types of Business Process Visibility

 

Four Types of Business Process Visibility

So far we’ve learned that operational responsiveness is more than agility and business process optimization, it’s about plugging decision makers into business events and giving them the tools and information they need to respond to the unexpected, thereby allowing them to capitalize on opportunities, drive greater efficiencies, and reduce risk. We've also learned why it's so hard to achieve and how we deliver it through the Progress® Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite. Now let’s look at one of the key benefits of RPM – the ability to gain real-time visibility across your business.

Dr. John Bates, Chief Technology Officer at Progress Software

In Part 4 of our 7 part video series, Four Types of Business Process Visibility, John talks about the four different types of visibility that many companies may (or may not) have. These include visibility into: 1) modeled processes (business process management), 2)  un-modeled processes (usually legacy processes), 3) outside processes, and 4) the interaction between processes.

What’s great is that the Progress Control Tower™ gives business and operations managers the ability to see how all these different types of processes are performing – thereby giving you real-time visibility into ALL your business events.

Interested in hearing what industry analysts are saying about operational responsiveness? Watch the 3-minute teaser, Gain Efficiency. Avoid Risk. Seize Opportunity, by Gartner analyst Roy Schulte, and then download the entire video. You may also be interested in the paper Building Responsive Enterprises: One Decision at a Time written by industry analyst James Taylor.

Enjoy past videos of this seven part series:

What Is Operational Responsiveness?
Why Is Operational Responsiveness So Hard To Achieve?
Delivering Operational Responsiveness

 

Actional 8.2 Released

It’s a great time to be in New England. Bright fall colors frame every road as the trees that provide refreshing shade during the blistering summer days now provide a canvas of brilliant color. Nestled among the trees that line Route 3 north you’ll see corporate headquarters for Progress Software, a leader in Business Transaction Management software with Progress Actional.

Actional 8.2 was just released and continues to show significant advancements in supporting enterprises that need to ensure the success of every single important business transaction. As the heterogeneity of IT infrastructures increases, Actional can help organizations achieve this level of assurance by extending visibility into transactions that traverse environments that include Apache CXF and JBoss ESB. And if improving the customer experience and the performance of mission-critical applications is on your radar, be sure to visit the Actional website for details on expanded alerting—and other enhancements. This release is targeted for organizations that are looking to work more intelligently and with a laser-focus on quality and efficiency.

So does the release of Actional 8.2 trump New England’s fall foliage? With a true Bostonian accent I’ll just say, “When driving one’s cahr through Hahrvahd yahrd, one can rest assured that transactions are running smoothly, application perfahrmance is optimized and the customah experience is at an all time high!”

Gain Actionable Insight Into Your Operations at Summit 2010

The Progress Software Summit 2010 brings together the visionaries and experts who are applying today’s proven technologies that will help companies achieve operational responsiveness. Learn how applying business solutions such as Responsive Process Management (RPM) will help you gain agility, reduce risk and achieve 20/20 foresight. Transform the way you do business.

At the Progress Software Summit, you will:

• Learn how you can make better business decisions by achieving real-time visibility and actionable insight.
• Connect with your business peers and innovators, and share how you are - or are not - achieving operational responsiveness.
• See the latest innovations in business process management, complex event processing and more.

JOIN US IN A CITY NEAR YOU!

November 2, 2010 HUDSON NEW YORK 356 West 58th Street New York, NY	November 3, 2010 W HOTEL CHICAGO 172 West Adams Street Chicago, IL	November 10, 2010 BENTLY RESERVE 301 Battery Street San Francisco, CA
Our New York event begins at 11:00 am and ends at 5:30 pm, and is followed by a Cocktail Reception. Hear from Progress plus industry expert John Rymer, VP & Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, Inc. Our SPECIAL GUEST at the New York event will be Larry Kudlow: Mr. Kudlow is host of CNBC’s primetime “The Kudlow Report” and co-host of “The Call”. He is also the host of “The Larry Kudlow Show” which broadcasts each Saturday on WABC Radio. He is a nationally syndicated columnist and the author of American Abundance: The New Economic and Moral Prosperity. Learn more >	Our Chicago event begins at 11:30 am and ends at 5:45 pm, and is followed by a Blackhawks game. Hear from Progress plus industry expert John Rymer, VP & Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, Inc. Our SPECIAL GUEST at the Chicago event will be Dan Hampton: A first-round draft pick of the Chicago Bears in 1979, where he continued to play 12 years as a defensive lineman, Dan Hampton is an engaging football Hall of Fame personality who is well-known and liked for his anecdotal and motivational speaking style. Learn more >	Our San Francisco event begins at 11:30 am and ends at 4:40 pm, and is followed by a Yacht Cruise. Hear from Progress plus industry expert John Rymer, VP & Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, Inc. Our SPECIAL GUEST at the New York event will be Richard Karlgaard: Rich Karlgaard has a unique vantage point on the trends driving the business and investment climates. He is the publisher of Forbes magazine, where he writes a bi-weekly column. Mr.Karlgaard is author of the Forbes book, Life 2.0: How People Across America Are Transforming Their Lives by Finding the Where of Their Happiness. Learn more >

Delivering Operational Responsiveness

We've already learned that operational responsiveness is more than agility and business process optimization, it’s about plugging decision makers into business events and giving them the tools and information they need to respond to the unexpected, thereby allowing them to capitalize on opportunities, drive greater efficiencies, and reduce risk. We've also learned why it's so hard to achieve. Now, how do we help deliver it?

Dr. John Bates, Senior Vice President, Chief Technology Officer and Head of Corporate Development at Progress Software

Watch Part 3 of our 7 part video series. In this video, Delivering Operational Responsiveness, John explains how we've brought together three proven technologies that help companies achieve operational responsiveness – business transaction assurance, complex event processing (CEP) and business process management (BPM). All these powerful technologies are further enhanced with business rules and analytics.

The best part? You drive. A business control panel will give you the ability to gain real-time visibility into business events, immediately sense and respond to changing conditions, and achieve continuous process improvement.

Read what Wikipedia has to say about Responsive Process Management (RPM) and learn how Agent O applies RPM to tackle credit card fraud in real time. You can also follow Dr. John Bates on Twitter.

Enjoy past videos of this seven part series:

What Is Operational Responsiveness?
Why Is Operational Responsiveness So Hard To Achieve?

 

Are you a sitting duck or one that will respond immediately to threats?

While many organisations are being ‘cautiously optimistic’ about what the future holds, the realities of today’s tough business environment could leave them as sitting ducks, according to Rick Reidy, CEO at Progress Software. They might take consolation that they’re in the same pond, but when interest rates in Japan hit near-zero, banks continue to fail and mistakes can lead to a ‘flash crash’, the pond is not a safe place to be. Businesses may have money, but fear and uncertainty is holding back decision-making – we await further regulation and want to know the consequences of recent government changes.

 
Listening to Rick’s keynote at our UK business summit (#progresswsummit, if you want to follow on twitter), in the impressive surrounding of Chelsea Football Club’s ground, London, it seems most of the audience agrees – it’s not good enough to sit around and wait to see if growth returns, and you cannot grow simply by cutting costs. You have to take control of your own ‘growth agenda’, as Rick put it. Businesses that want to survive the next five years need better visibility, through putting processes in place that enable them to react quickly to meet customer demands, adapt to market changes and take advantage of new opportunities. As Rick has advised, businesses need to act on up to the minute information so that leaders can make decisions based on foresight, not hindsight.
 
If you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll already know that we call this ‘operational responsiveness’: the ability to sense and respond to customer and market changes so that organisations can move quickly to meet challenges and take advantage of new opportunities. 
 
Rick has talked about what this means in the airline industry: the notion of irregular operations has become a weekly reality as companies face intense market pressure, striking staff and disruption from natural phenomenon. ‘Swivel chair’ communication between operational areas is no longer good enough. To react quickly enough, they need responsive processes in place that can help them maintain services and inform customers, almost as-it-happens. If they don’t, they will face massive fines, lost custom and damaged reputation – risks no company can afford at present.
 
We’ll be hearing more from Gordon Penfold, CTO at British Airways, about their approach to becoming operationally responsive to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow. Watch this space for my take on his talk…

 

Stamford Bridge, here we come

Tomorrow sees Progress Software taking over Stamford Bridge, home ground to the world-famous Chelsea Football Club. We’re not just there to check out the players’ dressing rooms – we are being joined by James Caan, of Dragons' Den fame, as well as the great and the good of the UK business community, to discuss how businesses can start to make decisions based on foresight, not hindsight, in their operations.

Gordon Penfold, Chief Technology Officer at British Airways, will be sharing his insight on ‘operational foresight’, revealing how the organization has set itself up to better deal with the irregular operations that have become a fact of life in the last year. And Mike Gualtieri, senior analyst at Forrester Research, will be sharing his views on where the next wave of truly responsive business management is coming from, and which trends to watch for. And Progress' own Chief Executive Officer, Rick Reidy, will be giving a keynote too.

I'll be there, speaking in one session but also blogging and tweeting from the event. So watch this space for the latest updates.

For those of you attending, I look forward to seeing you there.

www.progresssoftwaresummit.com

 

Why Is Operational Responsiveness So Hard To Achieve?

We've already learned that operational responsiveness is more than agility and business process optimization, it’s about plugging decision makers into business events and giving them the tools and information they need to respond to the unexpected, thereby allowing them to capitalize on opportunities, drive greater efficiencies, and reduce risk. But why is it so hard to achieve?

Watch Part 2 of our 7 part video series featuring Dr. John Bates, Senior Vice President, Chief Technology Officer and Head of Corporate Development at Progress Software. In this 1 minute, 30 second video, Why Is Operational Responsiveness So Hard To Achieve?, John explains why many companies struggle to achieve operational responsiveness. He points out that the lack of real-time visibility is just one key reasons.

Read what Wikipedia has to say about Responsive Process Management (RPM) and learn how Agent O tackles credit card fraud in real time. Follow Dr. John Bates on Twitter.

Enjoy past videos of this seven part series:

• What Is Operational Responsiveness?

What is Operational Responsiveness?

Wikipedia defines it as “a desirable quality of a business process or supporting IT solution, which indicates its ability to respond to changing conditions and customer interactions as they occur. An operationally responsive business process or IT solution is one that reacts quickly and effectively to a wide range of business events as they occur, and is also one that is managed in such a way as to be rapidly and effectively evolved in response to changes in the business environment itself so as to drive both consistency and value of business outcomes.”

I like that definition but Progress Software expands on it by believing that it is the ability of business processes and systems to respond to changing conditions and customer interactions as they occur - enabling business leaders to capitalize on opportunities, drive greater efficiencies, and reduce risk. Operational responsiveness is more than agility and business process engineering optimization, it’s about plugging decision makers into business events and giving them the ability to respond to the unexpected, thereby effecting change directly.

Watch Part 1 of our 7 part video series featuring Dr. John Bates, Senior Vice President, Chief Technology Officer and Head of Corporate Development at Progress Software. In the 50 second video, What is Operational Responsiveness?, John explains what it really means to be truly operationally responsive.

Read what Wikipedia has to say about Responsive Process Management (RPM). You can also follow Dr. John Bates on Twitter.

Know Your ABC's: Business Transaction Management with Progress OpenEdge in the Cloud

This is the title of a session being presented at Exchange Online 2010 by Gary Cink on September 15th at 9:45 am. In this presentation, Gary will demonstrate how some of the complimentary Progress' products enhance the OpenEdge experience for business transaction management (BTM). BTM is a critical component in the new IT/Business relationship. Progress® Actional®, Progress's first class BTM product, translates data relating to an underlying IT estate into information that is relevant to various business stakeholders including operations staff, application development, quality assurance, and security & compliance personnel. With this knowledge the various stakeholders can make informed decisions, often proactively, to ensure the success of every critical business transaction necessary for the day-to-day running of a business. Actional also offers the capabilities of automating operational Service Level Agreements (SLA) against this estate, thus preventing issues or alerting appropriate staff to problems before they have even happened.

Learn more about Gary and this technical session on our View From The Edge blog.

You can also read the white paper SLAS: Lost in the Cloud? Service-level agreements (SLAs) are crucial any time a business service provider (BSP) provides an application or service to a client via the cloud. In the results of this survey, 76% of respondents report that SLAs are critical to winning new business. Yet, 84% are unable always to meet their SLAs.

Just how important are SLAs to BSPs in how they support, retain and win customers?

Progress recently commissioned independent research company Vanson Bourne to find out and here's a link to the results:

Survey Results: SLAS: Lost In The Cloud?

Read about the increasing importance of service-level agreements and the difficulties in achieving them. Whether you're a Business Service Provider (BSP) or a client of a BSP, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) deserve your attention. This report will give you some information about the changing nature of SLAs and how you can use them to your advantage. 

You can also learn more about how Progress® Actional® will help you manage your service-level agreements by enabling companies to meet SLAs and manage services to support business goals. With policy-based alerting tools, users can set service alert thresholds and define service behavior for dynamic IT management. Actional also provides business analytics about runtime operations and controls for changing process behavior, for example, to give high-value customers priority service.

Join Us At Progress Exchange 2010

Progress Exchange Online Conference is coming to a computer near you, September 14 – 16, 2010. This free virtual forum is the place for sharing ideas, tips and best practices on how to benefit fully from Progress OpenEdge in the cloud. You’ll be joined by OpenEdge users from around the world to explore hot topics like:

• Modernizing OpenEdge applications using GUI for .Net
• Combining Microsoft Silverlight and Progress OpenEdge
• Leveraging the latest and greatest of OpenEdge Architect
• Previewing OpenEdge 11 and the NEW multi-tenant database
• Enhancing OpenEdge performance
• Deploying OpenEdge in the Cloud
• Understanding how Savvion (BPM) and OpenEdge can work together

Register now and get ready to choose from over 36 interactive sessions in 6 tracks, including:

• Integration and Process Management
• Best Practices and Application Modernization
• Developer Tools & Productivity
• Operational Efficiency
• Software as a Service/Cloud Computing
• UI Flexibility

If you register before August 30th, you’ll be entered to win an Apple iPad. For more information and to register, please visit www.progress.com/exchange2010.

Credit Card Fraud Interrupted My Vacation...

And I learned first hand what responsive process management is all about - to a consumer like me.

I’m on vacation... Citi just called to check on a phone inquiry they just received. Someone was calling for information about my account. I mentioned that I didn’t make the call and then they asked if I’d made a $255 purchase in Burbank, CA at some toy store. Not only am I in NY, but I couldn't even remember the last time I used the card. I immediately looked in my wallet and there the card was. Someone must have gotten my number. Yikes! I’m a pretty big online purchaser so I am bummed. But I am really happy to have Citi on my side because the situation really could have gotten out of hand.

Citi effectively MANAGED the PROCESS and was truly RESPONSIVE. It made me feel great. Is your company operationally responsive? Are you making your customers feel great? Responsive Process Management (RPM) helps companies of all sizes and in varying industries achieve operational responsiveness so that they can retain customers and improve their customer experiences - just as Citi did.

Ironically, we recently posted a YouTube video that introduces Agent O (that's ooohhh). He’s on a mission to prevent bank fraud and is using the Progress RPM suite and Progress Control Tower as his mission control center. Watch the video! It’s fun.

Mission Operational Responsiveness: Progress RPM and Fraud Prevention

Imagine that you’re a Fortune 500 diversified bank. You have millions of customers worldwide using your credit cards to make purchases every day.

As a diversified bank, your customers expect great value and convenience every time they complete a transaction with you. To retain existing customers and obtain new ones, you are committed to delivering a convenient experience that meets your customers’ high expectations. Whether they have a credit card or savings account, you want their interactions to be seamless as they occur through your website, at ATMs, through merchants and in your branch locations.

Sometimes, things go wrong.

Diversified banks must balance delivering a convenient experience that meets customers’ expectations while continuously monitoring transactions in an effort to prevent bank fraud.

Meet Agent O and relive his fraud prevention adventure as he strives to monitor millions of transactions, when suddenly things go awry. Watch him combat the Syndrome crime family when they hack into ACME Trading Company’s network, stealing thousands of credit card numbers.

Will the Progress® Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite help Agent O stop the crime in time? Watch the video to find out, as the RPM suite is put to the test.

And then tell Progress how you can use RPM to become a business hero and enter to win an Apple iPad.

Information Overload? Three Ways Real-time Information is Changing Decision Management

Upcoming webinar: 26-Aug-2010 at 11am ET
More Info and Registration: http://bit.ly/dyCu0c

JOIN US! In a recent survey by Vanson Bourne, 94% of respondents say that responding to information immediately is critical to their business, yet only 8% currently report information in real time. Why? Because many are unable to filter through the enormous deluge of information coming at them from every angle. This web seminar will discuss 3 ways that real-time information and business events affect your decision-making process. Through real-time visibility and immediate sense and respond, you get the right information at the right time. The result is decision management that is “in the moment” and operational responsiveness that meets the speed of your business.

Hope you can attend: http://bit.ly/dyCu0c

BPM in Financial Services

A few weeks back we attended the SIFMA Financial Services Technology Expo in New York City. Though I wasn’t able to attend, the rumors in the hallways are that it was a very successful, and fun, event. Bummed I missed it!

However, while our Capital Markets team was busy talking to customers, meeting with analysts and press, and Tweeting from the SIFMA event floor, I was back at the headquarters working on publishing the new Savvion solution brief, Improving Business Processes in Financial Services. This solution brief describes how processes are typically implemented in financial services firms today and how Progress® Savvion™ business process management (BPM) solutions can put people in the center of the process, enabling collaboration, control, and ongoing refinement. This 13 page paper presents ideas on how you can improve a few of the most important processes faced by the financial services industry, including:

• New account initiation;
• Loan and insurance policy origination and underwriting;
• Loan and insurance policy servicing;
• Dispute/claims resolution;
• Regulatory compliance and risk management.

Read the entire brief >

SIFMA Highlights

In case you too were unable to attend SIFMA this year, here are just a few of our highlights:

** New Capital Markets Foundation announced!
** People who dropped by our booth were eligible to win an iPad if they completed a short survey. Survey results are forthcoming!
** New generation of our Market Surveillance Accelerator announced!
** For thirsty attendees we hosted two "refreshment" events which generated lots of traffic and great conversation.
** RPM in Financial Services white paper released.

OVUM Recognizes Savvion’s Outstanding Technology Assessment and Clear Product Roadmap

Business process management (BPM) software solutions – often called "suites" – are one of the hottest areas in BPM, but choosing the right BPM solution for your organization may be a daunting task. Ovum, an industry analyst firm, recently conducted a research project that placed Progress® Savvion® in the “shortlist” category. The report measured BPM vendors across three criteria: market impact, end-user sentiment and technology offering. Ovum then placed each of the vendors into one of three categories: explore, consider or shortlist.

Before you make your decision on which BPM suite is right for you, learn more about Savvion in this report.

SSO. DONE.

Today I had the opportunity to mark the Single-sign On project that I’ve been working on for well over a year as “DONE”. It’s actually the 2nd time I acted as the business liaison to implement that feature on a Progress-hosted website. I’m not sure what happened to the first one… All I know is that I moved to another group and while I was gone someone broke it; so we started from scratch. I was happy to finally take a step into the 21st century.

I’m not going to go into detail about how we got here but I will say that SSO evokes a strong debate between “the business” (in this case web marketing) and IT. I have to admit though... today I feel like a bit of a winner. Not only does it mean that a visitor to our web properties needs only to register once to gain access to white papers, demos, software, support applications and gated communities, but they’ll also get a pretty custom-login and post-in page when they visit. IT didn’t like that… :-)My next battle will be the length of the registration form. Ugh!

While I was busy testing and prepping for the launch, we made some new resources available – a video, a webinar and a white paper. The webinar is moderated by IDC Program Director, Maureen Fleming, and Progress CTO, Dr. John Bates. It explores factors driving the emergence of business navigation systems and how they improve operational responsiveness by:

• Expanding visibility of all business operations;
• Enabling you to sense and respond to opportunities and threats as they happen — not after;
• Make continuous, real-time improvements to business processes;
• Reduce your time-to-value.

Get these resources, test out our new SSO feature, and become part of the Progress community! I would also welcome your thoughts on improving it!

Download resources >

Reduce Order Fallout and Improve Your Customers' Experience

A New Video / Flash Presentation

Our audio presentation, Lost in Transactions – A Day in the Life of Application Failure, presents the fictitious story of one company struggling to find the root cause of application performance problems. If your enterprise identifies with their pain, take the next step by learning more about business transaction assurance with Actional.

Visit our website to view the Flash, or visit the Progress Software YouTube channel to watch the video.

Enjoy!

[Note: The voice of Karen is me, and the voice of Chuck is our own David Bressler.]

New Videos - Savvion Acquisition Part I & II featuring Dr. Bates and Dr. Ketabchi

> Link to Progress Software's YouTube channel

Listen in as Dr. Bates, CTO of Progress Software, and Dr. Ketabchi, founder and CEO of Savvion, discuss the recent acquisition, and Progress Software’s entry into the business process management (BPM) marketplace. Savvion's BPM suite is a perfect fit with our enterprise BEP and BTA solutions.

SOA? What do you call it?

Some of you may have noticed that we renamed our blog from SOA Infrastructure to Integrated Infrastructure. This came about when our product marketing team wanted to create a new “Open Integration” blog – same authors, same topics. Admittedly, I wasn’t a proponent of it because I wanted more blogging activity here, and I wanted to leverage the audience (and SEO truth be told) that we've built up over the past two years. So, I recommended that we re-brand it and we did.

I have no doubt that one of the reasons we wanted to move away from SOA was due to last January’s post by Ann Thomas Manes, SOA Is Dead; Long Live Services. Lots of SOA evangelists commented about the post, including our VP of Products Dan Foody who agreed with Anne’s perspective. Me? I personally think that SOA in itself is just a marketing term for a number of fairly distinct things, including enterprise integration.

With that said, this wouldn’t be a post by me if I didn’t offer or promote something, so I’m going to let you fill in the blanks.

Our new white paper The Foundation of _________ Quality is now available! What does _________ quality really mean? This white paper not only answers that question but it also examines the many facets of _________ quality. Read it and learn how you can ensure that your _________ initiative, such as Web 2.0, cloud computing, and BPM, can deliver the visibility and operational responsiveness that your enterprise demands. Get the white paper.

If you’d like to learn more about how your enterprise can achieve operational responsiveness, visit the Progress Software website.

Adding Leading BPM (Business Process Management) Solution to Our Portfolio

Our integrated infrastructure (or SOA infrastructure) portfolio just got broader and better! On Monday Progress Software announced the acquisition of Savvion, Inc.  Savvion offers a comprehensive, standards-based BPM suite that helps more than 300 of the world’s top-performing companies – including 24 of the ‘Fortune 100’ – automate and continuously improve critical business processes. Dr. John Bates, Progress Software’s CTO and Head of Corporate Development, says, “The Savvion BPM suite is a perfect fit for Progress because it offers leading capabilities for business process modeling and execution. The suite also uniquely includes other integrated key capabilities, including business rules management, document management, an event engine and an analytics engine.”

Progress Software made the announcement during our Global Field Operations Conference in Orlando, FL, which is being held this week. Those lucky enough to attend were able to hear David Bressler deliver a great sales pitch that really communicated the benefit of having the industries best-in-class BPM technology in our briefcase. The combination of our Business Event Processing (BEP), Business Transaction Assurance (BTA) and Integration portfolio, coupled with Savvion's BPM suite, will enable enterprises to achieve the highest levels of operational responsiveness.

To learn more about this announcement, visit our Apama Event Processing blog and read two posts by Dr. John Bates:

• Why businesses must evolve their business processes to be highly responsive, dynamic and predictive – or they will cease to be competitive
  
  
• 10 Reasons Why Progress Chose Savvion

Welcome Savvion to the Progress family, and stay tuned for more details.

A BEP On Our Radar...

Last year Progress Software started talking a lot about Business Event Processing (BEP)—more commonly known as complex event processing (CEP). It really kicked into gear when we commissioned an independent technology market research company, Vanson Bourne, to conduct a survey and report on their results. Vanson Bourne interviewed 400 companies representing energy generation, telecommunications,and logistics sectors in the US and Western Europe. Why these industries? Well, because of the volume and complexity of their "business events" (service delivery) - both through systems and processes, and customer, partner, and supplier interactions. The results of the survey, detailed in the paper Overtaken by Events? - The Quest for Operational Responsiveness, demonstrates that harnessing business events, smart interpretation, and fast response are clear objectives for these industries. And the need is immediate.

Below I've included the Executive Summary of Key Findings. If you'd like to get more detail on their findings, visit our website and download the complete paper. 

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY OF KEY FINDINGS

The Objective Is Operational Responsiveness

Operational responsiveness is the ability of business processes and systems to respond to changing conditions and customer interactions as they occur, enabling business leaders to capitalize on opportunities, drive greater efficiencies, and reduce risk. The survey identified a number of key pointers as to why businesses would be keener than ever to improve how they respond operationally, for example:

Customers

• 91% said they are trying to act in a more personal “one-to-one” way with the customer. That means paying more attention to specific, individual feedback.
• 74% reported that areas such as digital market channels, mobile platforms, and social channels have caused a significant increase in the flow of information into and through their business. That means paying more attention to events in the context of a blizzard of communication.

Competition

• 70% of the businesses surveyed said that it would it be an advantage to be able to price their products based upon dynamic factors, in response to intra-day changes, such as changes in competitor prices/activity.

Process efficiency

• Operational incidents can be costly: 82% of companies surveyed have to continuously monitor processes to try to prevent them happening.
• 72% said their business processes take too long, and they need to shorten them.

Businesses want to respond quickly and more accurately to business events at the operational and business planning level. Real-time information delivery is seen as an important contributor, seen as having a role in three key areas:

• Monitoring KPIs—overseeing pre-ordained service or business performance benchmarks.
• Automatically alerting end users when certain conditions occur—flagging exceptional circumstances or activity for colleagues to take action.
• Automating response processes—delegating conditional processes to the operational systems

Of the companies surveyed 82% are planning investments in real-time technology by mid-2010 in the hope of achieving the vision.

But the Road Is Long...

The survey reveals that most companies still have a long journey on the path to operational responsiveness as defined above. Here are a few stand-out numbers that underline the current situation:

Service delivery and process gaps

• 67% hear about problems in service from customers before they have identified those problems themselves.
• Only 8% report currently business information in real-time: indeed only 19% report on an intra- day basis.
• 72% think that their business processes take too long and they need to shorten them.
• 89% cannot get a single view of process performance because information on business processes is held in multiple different operational systems. 80% use middleware to try to bring data together but not to the satisfaction of those in charge of operations.

Business planning gaps

• 34% say that, by the time they are able to see a change or trend in one of their business processes, they have missed some if not all of the opportunity to react to it.
• 47% of companies surveyed report that business information is typically analyzed to identify patterns and trends historically and not in real time.
• 58% admit that they have significant gaps in the information they need to support their business decision making.

Real-time Information and Business Event Processing (BEP)

In fact, 94% of businesses said that real-time information is important to them, and 78% said immediacy of response to business events provides a competitive advantage. But where business information is incomplete and/or sits across a range of disparate, non-compatible operational systems (as is admitted by most of the companies surveyed here), then speed alone is not enough. Where BEP is being tried out, users are already witnessing the power of combining and correlating across platforms, as well as the desired advantages that real-time systems would provide:

BEP benefits experienced so far

• Filter and analyze lots of events quickly—66%
• Take automatic actions in response to certain sequences of events occurring—55%
• Better monitoring of existing operational systems—50%
• Normalizing and correlating events from multiple different sources—45%
• Providing real-time visibility into information for business end-users—42%
• Spotting time-sensitive event patterns—25%

If you'd like to get more detail on their findings, visit our website and download the complete paper.

Progress Software Announces Q4 results - Here are some highlights

Progress Software (NASDAQ: PRGS) just announced their Q4 earnings release. To summarize, it says "Earnings Up in Q4; Progress® Actional® Revenue Up with Triple-Digit Growth; Progress® Apama® Revenue Up with Double-Digit Growth." What I really thought was interesting was the Q4 highlights. The majority of wins involve building or enhancing an integrated infrastructure, and application modernization - both topics we cover in this blog. In case you missed the release, I've included these highlights below. Enjoy!

Q4 Highlights

• Progress Software announced that the Progress® Sonic® ESB (enterprise service bus) is deployed and operational at British Airport Authority’s (BAA) Heathrow Airport Terminal 5.
  
  The Progress solution enables BAA to provide airport integration capabilities using the Sonic ESB product. This includes the creation of reusable integration services for new Terminal 5 systems and of specialist adaptors for the integration of existing key operational BAA systems, such as the Airport Operational Database Integration. (Tag: Application Integration)
  
  
• Progress Software has successfully enabled more than 250 Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to deploy thousands of on-demand, SaaS applications over the past five years.  These ISVs use the Progress® OpenEdge® SaaS platform to build applications that are used in some of the most demanding and diverse business environments in the world. (Tag: Cloud Computing)
  
  
• British Airways selected Progress Software SOA Solutions to upgrade their travel experience.  The UK’s largest international airline, British Airways (BA), will use the Progress portfolio of SOA solutions as a key part of its travel program to upgrade its IT systems by integrating over 600 different electronic systems and processes involved in getting BA passengers in the air. The flexibility of the Progress SOA portfolio allows BA to extend the features of its e-commerce site right through to its airports, by allowing greater self-service functionality and 'plug and play' capability. (Tag: SOA Success)
  
• match2blue stands out from the crowd with the Progress® Apama® Business Event Processing (BEP) platform by adding real-time capability to next-generation social networking. Enterprise platform enabler for mobile solutions, match2blue (www.match2blue.com), has selected the Apama platform to empower its social networking platform with real-time information on location, ideas, news and trends.  The Apama BEP platform will form a crucial part of match2blue’s back-end infrastructure, providing the performance and scalability needed, as well as supporting its business partners, who will be operating the location-based services to control and monitor their operations through dashboards. (Tag: Complex Event Processing)
  
  
• Alphameric Solutions Ltd, the leading solutions provider to the gaming industry, selected the Sonic ESB to revolutionize the way it handles content and messages across its network. Relying on highly complex and automated processes to deliver odds, prices, race information and documents across a distributed architecture – most needing to be handled in a sub-hundred millisecond timeframe – Alphameric needed a simpler way to incorporate new or updated information in real-time. (Tag: SOA Best Practices)
  
• West Bend Mutual Insurance Company has selected the Sonic ESB (enterprise service bus) and Actional products to underpin a service-oriented architecture (SOA) based IT infrastructure.   West Bend Mutual Insurance, a property and casualty insurance carrier, is pulling together dozens of disparate internal policy administration applications into a single integrated insurance portal. (Tag: Distributed SOA)
  
• Progress Software announced the availability of the Apama 4.2 Event Processing Platform.  The Apama 4.2 release extends the capabilities of the previously announced Apama Parallel Correlator, and introduces significant new developer productivity features that accelerate the deployment of event processing applications. The Apama Parallel Correlator leverages multi-core, multi-processor hardware to deliver high throughput, low latency execution that has achieved seven-fold performance improvements, as benchmarked with real-world customer applications. (Tag: Event Driven SOA)
  
• Slumberland, a leading furniture retailer, is now using standards-based data connectivity products from Progress® DataDirect® for reliable, high-performance support for all their major databases and 64-bit operating systems, for reliable connectivity to their Oracle applications, and streamlined reporting to improve fulfillment and customer satisfaction. (Tag: Semantic Data Integration)
  
• Progress unveiled the industry's first mainframe SQL engine for non-relational data, which can leverage zIIP specialty processors for lowering a mainframe’s total cost of ownership (TCO), with the announcement of its DataDirect Shadow Release 7.2.1.  The DataDirect Shadow release includes ANSI SQL-92 to Non-Relational Data with zIIP Offload and new capabilities that lower costs and attract new process-intense workloads to the mainframe.

Open Source Software Powers the Biggest Physics Project in History

Today Progress Software announced that the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN*) is using Progress® FUSE™, to run its operational grid activities of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) re-launch which happened this month. FUSE is an open source product line based on several Apache projects for which IONA (acquired by Progress in June 2008) provided leadership and Progress today continues to be a significant contributor. There are many skeptics that believe open source software isn’t meant for large-scale projects but CERN has proven that wrong. Not only has FUSE will underpin all grid monitoring systems used in CERN’s quest to find the Higgs Boson—known as 'The God Particle', but CERN welcomes the opportunity to contribute back to the open source project and deploy it freely across all their sites.

James Casey, Technical Architect at CERN, sites “We needed to find a partner that could help us bring agility and reliability to our IT infrastructure.” He added, “We have a pipeline of projects that we need to deliver over the coming years, so this first step lays the foundation for change.”

In addition to using FUSE, CERN also deployed Progress® SonicMQ® to form the communications backbone of its Technical Infrastructure Monitoring (TIM) system, designed to alert researchers in the event of an emergency. The use of open and “closed” source software creates a true open integration environment that re-enforces the fact that every organization has the power to choose the solutions that best fit their integrated infrastructure requirements.

Meet Progress Software On The Road Next Week

Before we jump into the swing of holiday shopping, celebrations and announcing year end numbers, we're hitting the road. If you are attending Gartner AADI in Las Vegas or Management World Americas in Orlando, make sure to take time visit us. Here's where Progress Software will be:

7 - 9 December 2009
Las Vegas, NV
Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit
This is the year's MUST ATTEND conference on Cloud Computing, SOA and Applications. Regardless of your challenge, you'll find answers that fit your needs in today's changed environment. And the best part... Progress Software is going to be there, at Booth #3. As a platinum sponsor, we'll be speaking about how our customer, Sallie Mae, used event-driven architecture to transform their IT department into a strategic partner for its business.

> Learn more!

8 - 10 December 2009
Orlando, FL
Management World Americas
In addition to visiting us at Management World Americas in Booth #112 during exhibition hours, you can see how DataXtend SI and Apama are being used in three TM Forum Catalyst projects. As part of the show's Forumville event, they are featuring five Themed Zones that focus on key areas for customers, services and networks – all driving towards optimizing business performance. See our products in action!

> Reserve your FREE book!

HOPE TO SEE YOU!

Holy Cloud! Thousands of Customers & Hundreds of Partners

At parties, I do everything I can to avoid talking about work. But, when forced, people eventually ask where I work. When I tell them Progress Software, it's usually followed by "No, we're actually a big public company that does more than databases."

I bet you didn't know we had thousands of SaaS customers in production using our products... Well we do!

And, by the way, it makes a great opportunity for each of those to use Actional for both cloud governance and inter-mediation for customer-specific policy and really flexible standards-based application layer security. If we never sold a new logo, we could still grow like weeds. Our tiny competitors are struggling to survive the recession after raising tons of money their investors will never see again, and we're in a position to thrive by delighting our existing customer base. Awesome.

And not only do we have thousands of customers, we have hundreds of partners adding vertical value to our software solutions.

That partner thing. It's big here.

Why does it work so well for us? Well, that's a huge thanks to the culture of collaboration here at Progress. Actually, it's more than that. It's like an open source attitude towards collaboration (even when we're creating commercial products). We listen, we adapt, and we learn.

We're a day away from the end of our fiscal year, and things are really crazy as you'd expect as we close our year end business. This has been a real transitional year for Progress and another successful year for Actional:

1. We've absorbed IONA and Mindreef, and rolled out new products around integrating those technologies with Actional.
2. We've received top recognition from Gartner and Forrester analysts, and Forrester even delivered a few use cases demonstrating hard ROI numbers around Actional deployments at our production customers in finance and telco.
3. We've delivered another major release update, demonstrating Actional's capabilities well beyond traditional web-services based SOA by integrating Progress OpenEdge, SAP ABAP, IONA Orbix IIOP, Spring, and Microsoft BizTalk orchestration support.
4. We've weathered a very bad economy, and we're quite well positioned for a very strong 2010 with our top-selling Business Transaction Assurance offering.

Worried About Business Transaction Failure?

Besides costing you money, each failed transaction diminishes customer experience, and can even push your customers to competitors. We just released an Infographic that shows how Progress® Actional’s patented architecture and other key differentiators work to preserve the health of all transactions. It will allow you to see exactly what makes Actional unique, and how transactions are automatically discovered and tracked in a typical process flow. 

With improved business transaction management, you will:

• Enable centralized management and distributed policy enforcement for a cost-effective solution;
• Achieve real time exception management to diagnose and repair transaction problems quickly;
• Get the ability to optimize and create quality services before they are deployed.

WANT TO LEARN MORE? Download the PDF our Business Transaction Assurance Infographic. You can also register to get our E-kit which includes insightful papers and an E-book that will help you ensure that your web services never fail.

Optimize SOA to Better Serve Your Business Goals

Tomorrow, June 27th at 11am (ET), our Actional product team will be hosting a live webinar entitled, How to Optimize SOA to Better Serve Your Business Goals. The webinar features Sandy Rogers from IDC and we will discuss the critical steps necessary to ensure that your most vital business concerns -- your enterprise and its customers, channels, and partners -- will get the best service, resulting in a true competitive edge.

Register and attend the live webinar.