View from the Edge

Straight From the Source: How One of Our ISV Partners Uses SaaS to Improve Business

Almost all businesses—large or small—have a need for a comprehensive human resources (HR) program to serve their most valued resources, employees. Leading integrated benefits, payroll and human resources solutions provider Unicorn HRO provides solutions to manage HR processes with greater speed, scope and depth.

In the ’80s, Unicorn’s on-premise solution addressed approximately half the target market needs, and they knew they wanted to offer more.  Today, Unicorn leverages the Progress OpenEdge SaaS application development platform to help their customers, from mega-corporations like McDonalds to lesser-known SMBs (small-medium businesses), do business with greater efficiency.

I asked Tim Diassi, EVP and GM for Unicorn HRO to share the top reasons they use SaaS and this is what he told me:

• Ability to deliver services via the Web -- Unicorn releases new software upgrades twice a year with updated federal, state and local tax rates. SaaS helps Unicorn keep everything up-to-date so that customers can quickly and easily take advantage of the newest software version to stay compliant.
• Reduced time-to-market – The scalability and flexibility of a SaaS application development platform accelerates the speed with which Unicorn distributes software upgrades. In fact, Unicorn migrated 50 clients over a single weekend, without a hitch.
• Business continuity and disaster processing – Just because your network goes down, doesn’t mean your business can stop running. Unicorn’s service teams have kept customers’ applications up and running during all kinds of crises, including Hurricane Katrina.
• Increased ROI – Thanks to the cloud, Unicorn has experienced double-digit growth for the past 5 years without adding any significant cost of capital investment for the development of new services.

The Progress–Unicorn partnership shows the true power of SaaS. We’re excited to continue to work with such an innovative company as they plan further leverage SaaS for increased efficiency and business process integration.

Thanks and as always, please feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you think.

5 Signs You Need a Business Process-Enabled Application

As I have mentioned many times before in various forums, next generation business applications need to be able to quickly adapt to business changes. The old, traditional way of hard-coding workflows is just not acceptable anymore. There is a need to drive continuous change and process improvement even within pre-existing business applications.

But how can you tell whether or not your application is in need of an update? Here are five signs that you need a business process-enabled application:

1. You have more menu items then puzzle pieces.
   While using an application, users want to seamlessly get through their work with as few detours as possible. Unfortunately some applications make customers feel like they are putting together a puzzle – lots of pieces and no guidance as to where to begin. A business process-enabled application can guide users through the application with a customizable wizard-like interface, creating a much friendlier and better user experience.
2. Your workflows are set in stone.
   Hard-coding workflows into your application may have worked in the past, but today’s dynamic applications shouldn’t force users to follow a path that might not be correct and/or efficient. Today’s customers demand more flexibility and continuous process improvement, and business process-enabled applications allow you to tailor processes as needed.
3. Your customers are NOT all created equal.
   Ford used to say you can have your Model T in any color you like, as long as it’s black. Unfortunately, the same goes for many applications these days. A company will tell its customers or users that they can use the application to get the job done as long as they do X then Y then Z. That specific process might not make sense for each customer or user. They want to be able customize the workflow to work best for them, and by providing business process-enabled apps, you can provide the right solution for each specific need all with a single application.
4. Your IT team makes your business decisions.
   Business decisions should address customer and market demands, not what works best for the IT department. Yet many applications are updated based on what the IT department thinks is best. By adding business process management (BPM) capabilities to your existing application, you can drive better decisions that are acceptable to the business folks, all while adjusting quickly and easily to market changes.
5. Your application picture is worth a thousand lines of code.
   Many companies will collaborate with their customers or users to determine what processes and workflows should be included in an application and then capture them in some form (e.g. paper, whiteboard, graphical diagramming tool like Microsoft® Visio®). Next, they hand over the results to the developers and tell them to “build the application.” Ultimately, this means the work is done twice as the developers try to figure out how to code what they see. Business process-enabled applications let you quickly capture the process or workflow graphically and simply “plug it in” to the business logic of the application and you are off and running. Think Visio on steroids. That graphical “picture” is now worth much more than the 1000s of “words” or lines of code. It means you only do the work once and also gain better visibility into how the application functions without requiring a master’s degree in computer science. Plus, the business folks can stay engaged.

In summary, if any of these points resonate with you, maybe it's time to think about business process-enabling YOUR business application.

Thanks and, as always, please feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you think.

Imitation is the Highest Form of Flattery

It’s nice to be first…

First makes you a thought leader. First means you are ahead of the curve. First tells everyone else “follow me…”

On September 20, 2011, Progress announced the general availability of Progress® Arcade™ - a portal environment for simplifying the deployment of SaaS applications in the Cloud. The Arcade platform is Cloud agnostic to prevent vendor lock-in, thanks to a partnership with RightScale. It’s so simple to use, it only takes a handful of mouse clicks to go from zero to the Cloud. You can move your application and data back and forth from the Cloud if you require without restriction. Initially, Amazon is the Cloud vendor for Arcade, with others following soon.

Now, read this:

On October 6, 2011 at Oracle’s OpenWorld Conference, CEO Larry Ellison announced the Oracle Public Cloud, which I happened to learn about from a blog post on TechCrunch. According to Ellison, the Oracle Public Cloud is a platform for the deployment of Oracle applications in the Cloud. It avoids vendor lock-in through Cloud interoperability. It allows the application and data to move back and forth from the Cloud if needed. And, it can “play nice” with Amazon.

Sound familiar? It sure does.

Progress was first to market with Arcade. Oracle was first as well – first to follow!

Again, it’s nice to be first…

Thanks and please feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you think.

All About the Cloud...

Last week I spent 3 days at the 'All About The Cloud' conference in San Francisco, an event that is primarily targeted at ISV's, and where for the first time Progress had a booth in the vendor Expo.  Let's just review that, Progress had a booth at a Cloud conference, to many that may come as a bit of a surprise, a welcome one I hope! So what does Progress have to offer with regards to Cloud?  More than you may realize.

If you read my last Blog post you will know about Progress Arcade, our initiative to simplify the task of getting to the Cloud for our customers & partners. In addition to Progress Arcade, there is also the work that the DataDirect folks have been doing around connectivity with the DataDirect XE for JDBC, Salesforce.com driver that enables Java based SQL to connect directly to Salesforce.com using JDBC,  making it easier and faster to query and modify data in Salesforce.com  from custom-developed and commercial Java-based applications.  Last, but certainly not least, there is the Cloud Ecosystem vision that was delivered by Progress CTO John Bates at the recent Analyst Day in New York, which envisions the concept of Vertically specialized ecosystems utilizing Solution Accelerators running in the Cloud, all heady stuff!

 

The general theme of the conference was around the concepts of Cloud, and its perceived value and adoption, with each speaker having some strong numbers to back things up:

• Bill McNee from Saugatuck Research asserted that 'By 2015, 50% of new IT spend will be based upon some element of Cloud'
• Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal - 'Every Business will be in the Cloud in the next 10 years, it's just one of those inevitable things'
• Matt Thompson of Microsoft - 'By 2014, Greater than 80% of all new software will be deployed in the Cloud, with 33% of all business applications being consumed via SaaS'

 

It was also interesting to hear from Matt Thompson that the investment being made by Microsoft into Cloud is the single biggest investment in Microsoft's history, period, and by an order of magnitude.

 

In addition to the booth, Progress also had a breakout session where our very own Colleen Smith, along with the CEO of RightScale, and the ISV Manager for Amazon Web Services, discussed the topic of Successfully Partnering in the Cloud, and how through building Progress Arcade we have partnered to have a solution that is a win-win for all parties involved. Maybe that should be a win-win-win...:-) Talking of Arcade there is a great article by Martin Banks 'Progress aims to open Cloud by abstracting it' that discusses the potential of opening up the Cloud to the non-tech-savvy brand masters via Progress Arcade!

One cautionary note in a keynote speech by Treb Ryan, CEO of OpSource, and also a guy who sold a company for $1.4b, yes, that's a b, was the issue of Cloud vendor lock-in, The concern that once an application is deployed with one vendor, how easy is it to move to a different vendor, especially in light of the recent Amazon outage.  Ryan's longer term vision was that of peer Clouds, which just as with peer networks, are transparent to the application and it's users, but the application can be seamlessly moved from one Cloud to another.  It's an interesting concept and will be something to watch, but he also stated that the only viable solution to achieve this today was by utilizing RightScale.  Remember them, the company that we at Progress are partnering with for our win-win-win!

Overall it was a great conference, well attended, we had some good discussions at the booth, and some cool feedback following the presentation by Colleen & co.  But it's also good to see Progress is at the vanguard of what's happening, as Jim Whitehurst, CEO of RedHat said in his keynote, "Cloud is a fundamental paradigm shift, like the move from mainframe to client server', and I couldn't agree more!

 

Thanks for reading

Mike

Announcing AutoEdge|TheFactory, a new OpenEdge Sample Application

To coincide with the release of OpenEdge 10.2b04 and Savvion 7.6.1 we are pleased to announce a new sample application, AutoEdge|TheFactory which can be found on Progress Communities : http://communities.progress.com/pcom/community/psdn/openedge/architecture/autoedgethefactory

AutoEdge|TheFactory is an extension of the use cases illustrated by the original AutoEdge sample application.  Where AutoEdge is based upon the business functions of an automobile dealer, AutoEdge|TheFactory is based upon the business functions of an automobile manufacturer supplying vehicles to dealers.

The aim of AutoEdge|TheFactory is to introduce the concepts of an OpenEdge Reference Architecture based Business Process Application utilizing OpenEdge BPM.

Recorded guides

To see more about AutoEdge|TheFactory  there are a set of videos that guide you through the installation as well as the design and running of the  application:

• The installation guide is here ; it contains a walk-through of the installation process (approx. 15min)
• A recording describing the design process in SBM Studio is here (approx. 30min)
• A recording running through the process appears here (approx. 12min)

The Source Code

In order to run the complete sample application you will need both OpenEdge 10.2b04 and Savvion 7.6.1 installed.  AutoEdge|TheFactory is developed utilizing the Object Oriented extensions to the ABL in OpenEdge 10.2B so you can install without Savvion in order to get a closer look at the code.

Selected code highlights

• Inversion of Control Container: InjectABL
• Query manipulation and query row keys
• Data request and response
• Enumerations in OOABL
• Structured Error Handling
• Strongly-typed Events
• Object Serialization

 

There is also a wealth of documentation related to the project available that highlights & describes many of the coding techniques & decisions made on the project so far.

 

This is the first of a planned number of releases of AutoEdge|TheFactory over the coming months, you can expect to see more functionality and documentation being added as we work our way through the project.

 

Please feel free to give us feedback, good and bad through the discussion forums attached to the project.

 

Special thanks go to all those people who worked on the project, with particular mention to Peter Judge for his tireless efforts in making this a reality, along with support from a cast of many including Havard Danielsen, Sarah Marshall, Dr. Kamyar and Ken Wilner for his constant feedback, plus those who helped test in the final days before going public.

 

Many Thanks

Mike

Kicking off 2011 in Sunny Florida...

We just got back from our ninth annual Global Partner Conference in Boca Raton – what a great way to kick off the New Year!  Especially in the warm 80 degrees weather as opposed to the stormy/wintery/snowy weather that has been happening every week here in Bedford!

Our Application Partners are very important to us, and this conference is our way of highlighting their great applications and ongoing participation in the Progress partner community. Their work extends the reach of our products even deeper into verticals that are near and dear to us. Our overall goal is to have our partners thrive and maintain success and we wanted them to connect and learn from each other at this week’s event.

At this year’s conference, we talked to many partners, including B&L Information Systems, Bluebird Auto Rental Systems, Franchise Technologies and others about their growth strategies for 2011 and how they have been able to focus on growth with the help of Progress tools. We love hearing success stories like these and will be bringing you some video content from various partners in the very near future.

We were also very excited to hear from QAD, Skyward, and VanMeijel about how OpenEdge BPM is helping them develop and deliver business process-enabled applications. These applications will give end users the capability to adjust and modify their business processes based on rapidly changing business and administrative needs.

Other key themes from the conference were integration and, once again, the Cloud. We heard from several speakers, including ZDNet’s Brian Sommer, Forrester’s John Rymer and others on some key integration best practices, how the industry is changing and speeding up overall, what it truly means to integrate your applications in the cloud, and how to communicate with new types of customers regarding their specific needs and solutions.

Finally, the conference would not have been complete without our annual awards ceremony, recognizing over 30 partners that were nominated based on their performance in the past year. Awards were given out in eight categories: Partner of the Year, Reseller of the Year, SaaS Excellence Award, Business Focus Award, Partner Collaboration Award, Fastest Growing Partner Award, Rising Star Award, and Innovator Award. Partner of the Year went to Epicor, an Elite Progress partner focused on the global Enterprise Software market.

We’ll be filling you in on more detail from specific sessions soon. Thanks again to all of our partners who attended the conference. We look forward to a great 2011!

Cloud: Hype or a Business Reality?

As we come to the close of 2010 I think it's interesting to look and see what state this thing called Cloud is in.

Firstly I think it's fair to say that the visibility of Cloud (which seems a bit of a strange thing to say, given it's nebulous nature, but you know what I mean) is higher today than it's ever been.  Who'd have thought that we'd have adverts on mainstream TV at peak viewing times saying 'To the Cloud..', although how plausible those adverts are is another matter entirely, but if nothing else Microsoft has raised the profile of 'the Cloud'.

Similarly the rise of things such as on-demand streaming from Netflix, the exponential growth of Facebook and other cloud based services has driven the concept of utilizing services where I have no idea of the underlying infrastructure, and quite frankly as a consumer why should I care, to new high's.

That's all well and good for consumer type stuff you say, but what about real Business applications, both with a lower and upper case A!  Earlier in the year I attended the CloudExpo conference in Santa Clara.  This was my second year attending the conference and it was amazing to see the growth in scale from one year to the next.  The number of attendee's (6,000), the number of sessions, the number of exhibitors were all way higher than the previous year, and listening to the organizers they're planning for over 10,000 attendee's at their next event in New York in the spring of 2011.  So certainly the interest from the business community is there.

But interest is one thing, what about actual usage?  The latest research from Saugatuck, http://goo.gl/pmXQD, states "by the end of 2014, an average of 50 percent of new software deployments worldwide will be made in the Cloud, marking a tipping point in business solution acquisition, implementation and deployment that will change the fundamental nature and roles of IT, as well as ISVs."  50%, that's a huge number, and so is the comment about fundamental change!

Ok, but what about the concerns of moving to the cloud, especially the #1 concern, security?  At the CloudExpo conference I had a chance to talk to Steve Riley, an evangelist at Amazon who specializes in security.  He has an interesting perspective about Cloud security, which to cut a long story short, boils down to the fact that the Cloud is in many ways more secure that your tradtional server room.  Just think how many of your employee's or collegues can simply walk up to your servers today and potentially switch them off?  Amazon won't even tell you where their data centers are located, let alone what machine your instance happens to be running on!  It was also interesting to see that for a brief period, before government pressure, WikiLeaks moved onto Amazon to avoid DDoS attacks as Amazon is architected to handle any such attack.

The public cloud vendors such as Amazon have made huge strides in the past few months in the area of security.  Recent press releases from Amazon tell of their ISO 27001 accreditation and SaaS70-Type II audits.  But one of the big concerns, especially from many of our partners has been PCI.  Any application that stores credit card info always raised a red card when it came to Cloud.  Well, just in this past week Amazon annouced that they've achieve PCI DSS Level 1 accreditation. http://goo.gl/4JwDH  That large thud you hear, is just annother barrier to Cloud adoption falling.

I think it's safe to say that in 2011 this phenomenon that is Cloud will continue to grow, in all aspects, the sheer number of vendors, it's adoption and relevance to the CxO level and below in businesses ranging from large corporations to start-ups (what other technology allows a start up to compete with the big guys when it comes to infrastructure).  And OpenEdge will be there every step of the way, as we move forwards with Progress Arcade, OpenEdge 11 & OpenEdge BPM, you can bet we're working flat out to make sure that you are best positioned to take advantage of what can only be seen as a game changer.  

Welcome to the new business reality!

 

Latest PSDN techTalk with Ken Wilner

BPM & RPM.  Just a couple of new TLA’s (Three Letter Acronyms) or does it really mean something to your OpenEdge application?  Progress has been talking a lot lately about Business Process Modeling and Responsive Process Management and for good reason.  The Progress suite of products in these areas are second to none.  But what does it really mean to OpenEdge?  Listen to Ken Wilner, VP Engineering, as he talks to Marv and Mike about how OpenEdge customers can use this technology now and going forward.

http://communities.progress.com/pcom/docs/DOC-106292

 

Top 5 Signs Your Business Applications Are In Need of a Facelift

How can you tell if your application needs a facelift?   Here are some telltale signs:

 1.  You turn on your computers and the screen shows a 1980’s “Green Screen” interface from MS DOS.

Today’s workforce is full of young digital natives, but many of today’s business applications seem stuck in the middle ages. This younger workforce needs to have an intuitive user interface (UI), similar to what they are used to using on a daily basis in Gmail, iTunes, and smart phones. Reading email on a green screen interface is just not appealing.

And this UI issue goes beyond just being intuitive – some companies are finding it hard to recruit younger workers due to their older, prehistoric looking applications.

It is important that we modernize our applications to look like the things we use on an every day basis at home, and move away from the dark (green) ages.

2.     You have to go to nine different screens to enter one invoice.

Today’s application users seek simplicity and ease of use, and hope to avoid complicated entry methods at all costs. Having an application that requires multiple pages of entry is not only complicated, but time consuming as well.

For instance, imagine if in order to send a text message from your iPhone, and it was a character DOS based prompt or even worse if you had to use a rotary dialer. Today, phones are able to store countless phone numbers, and you can even dial by voice – making the phone much simpler and easy to use.

Whether it’s five minutes or five pages, if your applications are complicated and not easy to use, then it’s time to consider modernizing your apps.

3.     You have to run from desktop to desktop to download an application onto each computer.

 Today’s workforce is no longer in one place – employees are traveling, working remotely, and need to be able to access important information on their phone. Yet many companies still rely on a sneaker network, where IT professionals must run from desktop to desktop, adding applications to each computer.

For instance, it wouldn’t make much sense if Google had to visit everyone with a computer that used their search engine to load updates. That is why web-based applications are so great, they are easy to update, and very portable – accessible from your cell phone, iPad, laptop, or desktop.

If you have a fat client server, and applications that reside on every desktop then you need an application facelift. 

4.     Your application can’t integrate with other applications.

Today we live in an integrated world – where applications are constantly communicating with each other to make our lives easier. However, many companies still rely on stand-alone apps – where the information you enter into one app stays only in that app.

It would be like if you went to department store, and in order to use your credit card the cashier had to enter your credit card information manually, call the credit card company to authorize the charge, then enter a authorization code to finish the transaction. Today it’s just swipe and your done – all of the applications are integrated and communicate behind the scenes. A lot of places will even remember your information and what you bought last.

It is clear that applications can’t stand-alone any more. If your applications aren’t integrated, then your apps are in need of a facelift.

5.     Your customers are all running completely different version of your applications

Today’s application provider should be able to support a single, multi-tenant application, allowing for multiple customers who can each personalize the application. This won’t work if all of your customers have different versions of your application, and you spend all your time managing and maintaining each version.

Back in the day, you weren’t a software provider; you were a custom consulting organization. It would have take two to five weeks of a consulting engagement just to make a change to the application.

If you are looking to deliver better services to customers, your apps needed to be workflow enabled. If you can’t run your business with a single code, then you should look into modernizing your app and taking advantage of newer technologies such as business process enablement.

The OpenEdge Multi-tenant Advantage

I was just reading a recent interview with Treb Ryan, the chief executive of OpSource by Forbes  and I think he makes some interesting points. 

His main theme during the interview is that multi-tenant applications and a multi-tenant architecture will become "dominant" and "present a challenge to the relevance and importance of a large amount of open source software".   The interview also touches on the point that even when you set out to create a new web application, "[with open source] you are going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting".  Of course, this isn't just true of applications created with open source platforms.  

As many of you know, our vision at Progress for many years has been about simplifying the job of creating the worlds best business applications, and if you've attended any recent OpenEdge presentations, (Exchange Online or Face-2-Face events), you cannot help but notice that the vision has been refined to position 'OpenEdge as the leading SaaS Platform for simplifying service development and delivery in the Cloud..".

One very real way this will be achieved, and that customers & partners of OpenEdge will be better positioned than any other application providers, will be the multi-tenant database capabilities that have been announced for OpenEdge 11.  This capability is truly a market differentiator and will remove much of the "heavy lifting" that Treb refers to, let alone the myriad of other features planned for OpenEdge 11.

By the way, if you've not seen a recent OpenEdge roadmap presentation and you're in Sweden or Canada, I encourage you to sign up for the remaining Face 2 Face events that are coming to you soon!

Alternatively sign up for Exchange Online 2010 where you're sure to hear a lot more about how OpenEdge is the leading SaaS Platform for application development.