View from the Edge

Learn the ABC’s on BTM with Progress® OpenEdge® in the Cloud on September 15th.

Gary Clink is an experienced OpenEdge Consultant and pre-sales Engineer working for Progress Software from their UK office. Gary joined Progress in 1999 having previously worked for a Direct End-User (DEU) in the Petrochemicals industry and also for an OpenEdge Application Partner (AP) working in the Transportation, Whisky (yes Whisky), and Personnel/Payroll industries.

Gary, having learned OpenEdge as part of his university degree, some 16 years ago, has always been interested in the rapid creation of business transaction processing applications. Gary has had a particular flair for development frameworks (having work with such frameworks as OpenStart, PS:eScript, Progress Dynamics, SmartObjects, and a number of others). Software Configuration Management has also played a key focus in Gary's career – having successfully deployed dozens of Roundtable TSMS implementations to address such things as version control, build management, deployment management, and legislative compliancy such as Sarbanes-Oxley.

Gary is currently focused as a Pre-Sales Engineer on helping large direct enterprise companies and government in the UK, Ireland and Scandinavia to expand their current Progress estate and to open up new technical and commercial possibilities using the complimentary products from Progress's extensive portfolio.

In Gary's session, Know your ABC's: Business Transaction Management with Progress OpenEdge in the Cloud, Gary will demonstrate how some of the complimentary Progress' products enhance the OpenEdge experience for business Transaction Management. Business Transaction Management (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 Transactions necessary for the day-to-day running of a business. Progress Actional also offers the capabilities of automating operational Service Leven Agreements (SLA) against this estate, thus preventing issues or alerting appropriate staff to problems before they have even happened.

Based on the centuries old Hippocratic oath of "first do no harm!", all of this is achieved by using Progress Actional's patented technology; which combines centralized management with distributed policy evaluation, ensures no server bottlenecks and therefore no degradation in an applications performance. Actional has been performing this function for several years for technologies such as Java, .NET, Corba, Middleware, Enterprise Service Busses, WebService, MainFrame Integration, etc. Now, starting with OpenEdge 10.2B, support for the OpenEdge platform is also included for key components such as WebSpeed Transaction Server, WebService Adaptors, Sonic Adaptors, AppServers, AppServer Internet Adaptors, and OpenEdge batch clients. What's really exciting is that all of this is achieved without having to modify your existing application, changed your application's behavior or write a single line of new ABL code. In addition to examining OpenEdge's support for Actional, during this session we'll also see how Progress Actional can be used alongside the Amazon Web Service (AWS) platform for application monitoring and Service Level Agreement (SLA) Management on the Cloud.

Come and join Gary in his session "Know Your ABC's: Business Transaction Management with Progress OpenEdge in the Cloud" on Wednesday, September 15, 2010 at 9:45 a.m. EDT. To register for Progress Exchange Online 2010, go to www.progress.com/exchange2010

 

Canada Tech Peaks and PUG Meeting

My journey to Canada began with a flight from Manchester New Hampshire to Toronto on a sunny and mild Tuesday afternoon. I was thinking how convenient it was to fly from my home airport rather than having to take the drive and fight the traffic around Boston. The plot thickened when I was led out onto the tarmac to board a twin-propeller plane that holds somewhere around 20 passengers. I especially enjoyed the baggage handler on the ground, who, once everyone was on the plane, boarded, took off their reflective vest, closed the cabin door, and took their seat as the co-pilot for the flight! With good weather on our side, the flight was smooth and uneventful.   

The turnout for the Tech Peaks meeting on Wednesday morning was excellent- around 25 or so attended. By a show of hands, many turned out to be long-time Progress customers, some for over 20 years. My presentation topic was the OpenEdge Strategy and Roadmap, and among other things, helped the audience understand why Software as a Service is something that will likely have an impact on their business over the next few years, if it hasn't already. The audience was most engaged in dialog on the upcoming Transparent Data Encryption for 10.2B, and the future OE11 multi-tenant table support. I was followed by Frank da Costa who gave an excellent presentation and demonstration of Actional monitoring an OpenEdge environment, a new capability for 10.2B. The audience gained an appreciation for how easy and fast it is, without having to do any coding changes, for Actional to automatically build a map of the transaction flows through the system, the level of detail that is available from the console, and the ease that rules can be established to, in real time, monitor and alert on things like Service Level Agreements.

Almost forgot to mention that the hotel conference room looked out on 2 sides to an indoor shopping mall. I especially enjoyed the people who stopped to stare in the window to see what was going on- maybe new potential cutomers! While this wasn't an actual photo from the event, there was a small boy around 3-4 years old that did spend a minute with us looking in.

My second stop was in Montreal for a Thursday afternoon Progress User Group (PUG) meeting. The attendance here was also good- in the 20's, and the presentation topics were the same. I was taken slightly by surprise when the PUG President opened the meeting speaking in French, with the follow on topic on the Progress corporate overview also delivered in French. It was interesting to try and follow along, but the jokes went right over my head.

I was pleased to see that many in attendance had already made the move to OpenEdge 10.2A, taking advantage of the latest features that we have to offer. With 10.2B coming out soon, and planning underway for a major new OE11 release, anyone who currently finds themselves working with an older version of Progress/OpenEdge should take a look to see what new features they could be using to improve their business, and how they can get up-to-date. Progress Communities is always a great resource for information.

Thanks to all who coordinated and supported these events- it's easy to overlook the work done behind the scenes to make these events both possible and successful.