View from the Edge

Is that quicksand in your cubicle...or are you just stuck?

"Dang, now we are in trouble..." - Taggart, Blazing Saddles (1974)

In that opening segment of Blazing Saddles, poor Bart and Charlie find themselves stuck in quicksand.

But what does a 34-year old satirical Western comedy film have to do with you and your application?

Well, you might use Taggart's line when you realize you can't give your business users what they need. Or you can imagine yourself in your cubicle, stuck in quicksand, unsure how to get started (if your imagination is not working for you, see it for real here).

But you don't have to be stuck, the Application Modernization process has three possible phases - Upgrade, Migrate and Transform.

• Upgrade - Loading OpenEdge 10 and deploying it without making any code changes
• Migrate - Adding in new capabilities without making major architectural changes
• Transform - Using new capabilities and new approaches to change the architecture

The difference between each phase is the amount of effort you put into it. The more effort you put into your application, the greater value you will get out of it.

To start climbing out of your quicksand pit, follow these steps:

1. Define your top business priorities - what does the business need to do (or not do) to be successful - next month and in the next year(s)
2. Research new capabilities - what is new in OpenEdge that can help you? (Hint: Search on Upgrade, Migrate and Transform on PSDN Online)
3. Review the common Application Modernization strategies - to determine what solutions are best for you. (If you don't know what they are, then you must have missed our Modernization webinar - but you can see the replay here.) 
4. Determine what the right level of effort is for you - just the right amount to maximize the value to your users
5. Define an incremental plan that works for you - so you can determine the pace and priority

With this proven approach, you can get your foot on the rail and start climbing out of the quicksand.

And if anyone knows how to get quicksand out of a keyboard, please let us all know...

24 x 7 in a SaaS World – What does that mean?

Most of the time, when we think of Software as a Service (SaaS), we focus on the first “S”, or the one that addresses the Software side of things.  But I think that the second “S” or the one that is about Service is the one that needs to be thought of a little more, as I believe it differentiates a SaaS provider and clearly is what customers will value the most.

Now, I know that it is important to have the business functionality of the application, otherwise you will not be able to attract customers, but it is definitely the service they receive that makes them not want to look elsewhere and stay on as a customer.  So in SaaS, it is the service that addresses customer retention, or more appropriately customer satisfaction.  Most traditional on-premise software vendors have been doing technical/phone support for their entire existence, so when I mention the word “service”, they always nod their heads and say – “Yes, we know we have been doing service for years now”.  But that is when I get concerned, because service in a SaaS world is more extensive, than in a traditional on-premise world.  Service in the traditional software world was about implementation/installation services and then phone support, as part of an escalation procedure, once all internal resources had exhausted their best efforts at fixing a problem.

In a SaaS model, the service provider takes on a new role, and that is one of full application management and support.  What I mean by that is they are no longer just about escalation, the SaaS provider is the only level of support in most cases, and the types of support issues are going to most likely be much more unique to a customer’s business process, and less about a technical glitch in the software.  Application support will now includes things such as password support, application accessibility, business process questions, and potentially even other user process inquiries.  The role of technical support increases to include upgrades, patches/fixes, and overall scheduled system maintenance, many of which most traditional software providers, have always relied on the internal IT organization to handle.  The other big change may come in the area of 24 x 7support - of course this may depend on the type of business application and customer - but it is still something that everyone needs to think about as part of their total service offering.  The other area that should be discussed is backup & recovery services – as the SaaS provider is now responsible if anything should happen to the data of their customer, as well as of their own systems and data.

Progress has offerings that can help SaaS providers in both of these areas.  Some SaaS providers are now looking at offering 24 x 7support not only from their application standpoint, but also from a Progress perspective, which we offer as part of our extended support option.  Many SaaS providers use OpenEdge Management to monitor and manage the Progress environment, and even potentially offer this as a monitoring service to their customers.  The other area that I find SaaS providers looking at is using OpenEdge Replication for backup & recovery of data, as well as data protection. 

Of course keep in mind that these service offerings are above and beyond “basic” support, so the customer should understand the value of these services and should be willing to pay for them.  One of the biggest mistakes made by early SaaS providers is to create one price for their offering, thus making it very difficult to add other service offerings and with that – up the price.  SaaS providers need to take a lesson from the hosting providers and potentially offer an “a la carte” pricing menu and along with that, make sure that they can position the value associated with each of the service deliverables.

Look for more information in the next coming months about the SaaS journey, as we see it happening.  As always, any comments or questions just let me know at cosmith@progress.com.

Disaster Recovery - Avoiding Catastrophic Losses

Let's talk about Disaster Recovery (DR) for a moment. I was talking with a customer about how he's managing his business in these tight times. He said that down-time cost the business about $100,000 US per hour, and that the level of impact in a tight economy felt like it was even more than that. Do you have a cost figure for down time? Is there a defined point where you call in your insurance company because down-time has become a catastrophic loss? What an awful time. Whether it's a bad disk controller, a flood, or lightning hitting the CPU (yes - that happened) a good plan is a great thing.

Why blog about this? Well, an outage gets to be longer if there is no standby system, or if key users cannot reconnect to it quickly. We have seen outages get longer when simple human error overwrites a disk or misplaces a backup. A good set of written procedures and some well-designed recovery-scenario automation scripts sure help to keep a bad thing from going to a catastrophe.

Here's a question for you - if your Disaster Recovery plan aims to reduce the impact of outages, is there also a section that looks at staying reasonably up to date on your key software releases as a way to avoid the business impact of hitting a known fixed problem? An expensive outage that was avoidable is the unkindest disaster of all.

OpenEdge databases have a very solid reputation with our customers, but "things do happen". Why not schedule a walkthrough of  your Disaster Recovery plan and a check on the release notes for new service packs to see if there are opportunities to prevent or minimize any potential problems?

Stay Focused on the Long Term

The economic downturn is tough on all of us, and the natural inclination is to slash budgets, and in particular IT budgets in order to adjust to the turmoil. However, much like economic experts and financial planners say that you need to view your individual investment portfolio as a long term investment and not focus on the day to day churn in the market, I think the same goes for your IT budget. Additionally, by consistently investing in and enhancing your IT infrastructure, you can streamline your business operations and ultimately save your company money.

Simply increasing or maintaining the IT budget isn't enough, however. Companies need to examine how they are investing their IT budget in order to increase their efficiency. Investing in IT infrastructure to improve the efficiency of the business instead of simply maintaining what already exists is paramount to saving money in the long term, and I believe this is where companies should focus their investments. Unfortunately, way too many IT organizations find themselves focused on maintaining their applications.

If IT organizations have to constantly reimplement or rearchitect their applications to integrate and utilize the newest technology and platform features, then they aren't focused on adding new capabilities to their applications that serve to make them more effective and efficient. Maintaining the application becomes the priority and developing new functions is secondary.

So when you look for an application development platform you want to look for one that applications are built to last. One where you can be assured that your investment in your application will be maintained despite all the changes and technology shifts that may occur in the market place.

For example, many OpenEdge customers have been using the OpenEdge platform for 5, 10, or even 15 years or more. Over time there have been several shifts in the way applications are built and deployed and the technology environments in which they execute. Each of these shifts brings with them new opportunities, and while many of these shifts have required Progress OpenEdge customers to make changes and enhancements to their applications, these customers have always been assured that the core business logic that is part of their application didn't need to change in order to take advantage of these opportunities.