View from the Edge

Greetings 2012 – Say Hello to OpenEdge 11

As was mentioned in mid-December, the latest update to our OpenEdge platform is now shipping, and I am pleased to say that it is enabling hundreds of our customers and ISV partners to securely develop and deploy applications across any platform, any mobile device, and any Cloud.

One of the highlights of OpenEdge 11.0 is our patent-pending Multi-tenant Tables, in which data is physically (not virtually) separated in the database - providing greater security and control for Cloud deployments. Multi-tenancy is a critical component and key differentiator for our customers and partners, along with our multi-Cloud deployment options, business process-enabled development, and support for mobile devices.

Feedback has been very positive and many customers are migrating to OpenEdge 11.0 sooner than expected to take advantage of the increased security in the Cloud, greater deployment flexibility, reduced costs, and faster time to market. Let me share some of that feedback with you now.

Security and Flexibility through Multi-Tenancy

Jeffrey Brown, Senior Development Project Manager at Infor notes, “Progress provides us with the technology to power our Infor10 Distribution Business, a distribution application specifically designed to help distributors with complex business models run an efficient, end-to-end operation. We are interested in the new multi-tenancy capabilities in the OpenEdge platform that could provide us with the flexibility to add an additional level of security and separation of data at the database level that is unique in the industry.”

Reducing Cost While Speeding Time to Deployment

Another Progress partner, a global medical software and services provider, used OpenEdge to develop an order management system for internal call centers. Multi-tenant Tables in OpenEdge 11 provide a viable solution for compliance with data security regulations customary to the healthcare industry. Moreover, it facilitates the roll-out of their order management system to all companies they acquire moving forward, which will be deployed in a fraction of the time, for a fraction of the cost, and with better security measures.

Efficiency and Moving Down Market with SaaS

Over in Germany, EDV-Software-Service AG (ESS), a provider of ERP software and services for the mid-size housing and real estate market, is leveraging OpenEdge 11 Multi-tenant tables to move to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to gain efficiency and expand into new markets. Their CIO Michael Förster explained, “Progress Software understands the needs of medium-sized businesses and helps us provide value to our customers and accelerate our time-time-market with new solutions. We took part in the OpenEdge Early Adopter Program and Multi-tenancy Workshop, and in only five days were given the tools and expertise needed to get our new release ready for launch in early 2012.”

I look forward to hearing more about how our customers and partners are taking advantage of OpenEdge 11.0. For more information on OpenEdge 11.0, please review the “What’s New in OpenEdge 11.0” feature highlight.

Here’s to a great start to 2012!

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

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!

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.

What is Application Modernization all about and why should you care?

For successful businesses, the saying “don’t fix what ain’t broke,” has long been the standby guideline. That said, while your applications may technically be running properly, they very well might be quite broken.  It just depends on your definition of broken.

Today’s developers and technology strategists look upon an application with additional scrutiny. A “broken” application can be one that carries any inherent risk to many companies in ways that you may not have considered, such as: 

• Lack of employee productivity
• Less than stellar business process efficiency
• Customer dissatisfaction due to speed of service delivery
• Negatively affecting employee/customer retention and/or acquisition

For example, one of our customer’s that I was meeting with mentioned that its point-of-sale (POS) system, while running quite well and doing everything the company needed it to do, however unknown to them -it was in fact an inhibitor to the recruitment efforts for new sales associates in the stores. 

In this case, it came down to the user interface. The company’s application was functional, but it seemed terribly out of date to nearly anyone looking at it for the first time. The company learned that potential employees, who were 17-24 years of age, not only feared a steep learning curve, but actually perceived the POS system to be difficult to use, as they were used to a more “IPod” look & feel.

This is because the 21st century workforce is largely made up of digital natives, people who have grown up with an electronic lifestyle.  They are quite used to the human-machine interaction – but they absolutely need to feel at home in the user-interface of the applications that they use.

There are many easy ways to update applications, without requiring a complete redesign or even rip & replace of the back-end.  Some, like in the example above, center on the user interface.  Other application modernization efforts may focus on adding devices that are more suited for data entry in the worker’s environment, for example, enabling the use of ruggedized scanners at loading docks, or inclusion of data arising from digital scales.

Updating your applications may also save money in the long run. Out of date, sprawling applications tend to be more expensive to support.  As an old application continues to age, fewer folks within the IT organization may actually understand how the application was built or how to support it.  Inefficient applications may also lead to extraneous resource use (i.e., Internet bandwidth, database size) or require more constant support on the back-end.  Further, quite often, developers must spend time managing various versions of the application, instead of being able to update just one set of code.

The bottom line is that business workflows are continuing to change to become more dynamic and efficient, so applications need to be changed as well to best support those new processes.  That is what we see as a sure sign for the need to undertake an Application Modernization effort.

Where will new ISVs come from?

Someone asked me the other day whether OpenEdge is attracting new ISVs and if so where are they coming from.  The answer to the first part is yes – we do attract a number of new ISVs every year who develop brand new applications using OpenEdge.  As we’ve been at this for a long time, the numbers of new ISVs are nowhere near where they were back 10 to 15 years ago but there has been a steady flow each and every year for the last 5 years. 

The second part of the question is more interesting; where are they coming from?  The trend has clearly changed over the last 3 to 4 years.  A recent industry study I saw showed a 3% decline in the number of software companies due to consolidation.  Clearly fewer new ISVs are being created today than in the past and not enough to offset consolidation.

 The vast majority of new ISVs over the past 3 or more years have been pure Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. Many are offshoots of existing ISVs or customers that decide they can attack a new market and create a brand new SaaS application to attract a new base of customers. 

There are several advantages to starting a new SaaS enterprise, not to mention the most obvious; it is the only way to attract outside capital.  Many traditional, on-premise ISVs that add a SaaS version of their application, quickly realize it is a very different business from traditional applications.  Being a separate entity with separate sales, marketing, development and support has its advantages.  It allows you to more rapidly respond to the needs of your SaaS customers where “service” and “speed” are the key differentiators. 

So will SaaS and Cloud infrastructure accelerate the market for new ISVs?  I’m not talking writing an app to monitor golf handicaps but honest to goodness business applications. I’d be interested in your views.