View from the Edge

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

Progress Arcade, what's that? Can I play?

As Progress Arcade makes it's first tentative steps into the world (we'll shortly start a Beta program) I thought it might be worth while to do a quick posting as to what Arcade is and also importantly what it isn't.  I'm sure some of you reading this will know of Arcade, or at least have a vague understanding or heard of it in passing, but for some this maybe the first you ever heard of it! 

 

So, what is Progress Arcade?

Well, the first thing to say is what it isn't, and that is, it's not a product.  It's a destination!

 

A destination? So I can bring my quarters and start playing Space Invaders?

 

Er, No! It's a destination where Customers & Partners can go to Stage & Test, Demonstrate, Evaluate and Deploy Progress based Products and Applications in the Cloud, as well as  offer Services and join a community in discussion around all things Progress & Cloud.

 

Ah yes, to the Cloud! Any Cloud?

 

Initially our focus is on public clouds, with Amazon being our first, but the architecture and design of Arcade was built deliberately with the purpose of allowing multiple Cloud vendors to be utilized, it's just that we have to start somewhere, and so we decided to start with Amazon as they have the largest mind share today.  But the ability is there to offer other public clouds such as Rackspace, GoGrid, and even private cloud technologies such as Eucalyptus.  It's perfectly feasible that using Arcade you could have an Application Server running on one public cloud vendors infrastructure in one geographic region, and an associated Web Server running on a completely different cloud vendors infrastructure in a different part of the world, allowing the deployment of servers close to the user for maximum performance.

 

Ok, that all sounds great, but it also sounds complicated!

 

Not at all!  My whole mantra for Arcade has been to make the Cloud 'Fisher Price' !!  You shouldn't have to go through a huge learning exercise, reading about AWS, EC2, S3, EBS, and all the other terms the cloud folks come up with (and they are just Amazon terms, you can imagine that the other vendors have their own terms) just to use the cloud.  So what if I were to tell you that once logged in to Arcade, in 10 clicks of a mouse (and that includes accepting some legal T&C's), you can have a multi-server deployment (Web Server and Application Server), with Progress products installed, up and running in Singapore!  That's the power of Progress Arcade.

Right, that all sounds fantastic, but I still don't get it.  What do I use Arcade for?

Well, there are a number of use cases depending on who you are, but lets review a couple. 

 

First lets assume you're a Progress Partner, you've heard about the cloud, read some analyst reports saying it's the best thing since sliced bread, and you have an application that you'd like to deploy in the cloud.  Arcade provides the ability for you as the Partner to go through the necessary steps to check out the cloud, make sure your application operates as expected in a cloud environment before you ultimately deploy.  The first step would be to use the 'Stage & Test' area within Arcade.  Stage & Test allows through a number of mouse clicks, the ability to on-demand request a deployment from a Progress provided list of options (Progress Products and Operating System choices), the cloud region you'd like to test in etc.  After the deployment configuration has been requested, Arcade builds the chosen configuration specifically for you based upon the options chosen.  Once created, the deployment can be started and you can log onto the running servers that have the products requested already installed.  You're now free to use the servers as required, so you can install your application and begin to perform whatever tests you'd like to make sure the application performs as needed.  When testing is complete and you're happy that the application and environment works as expected, there is the option to take a copy of the environment and in effect make that your gold-image.    From this point you now have a couple of choices.  Arcade allows you to 'Publish' the tested environment to either a Demo or Deployment area.  As their names suggest, Demo allows you to control demo copies of the environment for use by Sales people or potential customers, Deploy allows you to have a true production environment running 24x7x365. Again, all without the need of having to go though a huge learning exercise of all the cloud terminology.

 

Now lets assume you're an existing Progress customer, or even a new prospect, and you'd like to evaluate Progress products.  As a user I can log onto Arcade and select the 'Showroom' area.  This is where we as Progress use Arcade to offer evaluation environments for our products.  From a list of options, pre-determined by Progress, as a user you can select the Products and deployment configuration you'd like to evaluate, also with the choice of where geographically you'd like to run the servers, so if you're in Europe, select Europe, if you're in AP, select AP and Arcade will deploy the servers in your chosen region.  So that's great and everything, you get a set of servers with products installed to play with, but what do I do next?  Well another concept we've used for Arcade is the 'Out of the Cloud Experience'. 

 

'Out of Cloud Experience', what on earth does that mean???

 

Well, it wouldn't be much good if we provided you the evaluation environment, and when you logged on all you're presented with is a Desktop full of icons and told to have a nice day!  So in addition to the products being installed, we automatically install sample applications, such as AutoEdge, video's and guided tours that can walk you through some of the features and benefits of the products.  Once you've reviewed the content, you're then free to play and check out the products as needed.

 

So you're saying that as Progress, you're also using Arcade and the Cloud ?

 

Absolutely!  This is a great way for us to get product into the hands of customer and prospects without the need for them to download, install and configure product on their local machines.

 

Any more uses?

There are lots, and I could go on all day about this stuff, and believe me many people say I do!!

Looking back up the page I said this would be a quick post but already this is getting long, so I'll stop for now.  If after reading this you have any further comments or questions around Progress Arcade, please feel free to comment on this blog or email me directly (mormerod@progress.com).  As we go through our Beta Phase I'll come back and post more.  But for now, if you're still reading thanks for taking the time :-)

 

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

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

 

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.

   

OpenEdge, the open Force?

Use the "Force" Luke...Ok, now that's out of the way, because admit it, that's the first thing that entered your head when you saw the title. That Force is not the Force I'm looking for....OK, enough!

No, The Force I'm referring to is force.com, the platform provided by the folks over at Salesforce as a means of building Force applications. Let's be honest here, if you ask most people to name a major player in the SaaS application space today, most people would say Salesforce.com, and as such their platform upon which it's built, force.com, is held in high regard. But here's where is gets interesting.  I was reading a whitepaper the other day where I came across some figures :

• Overall Project Cost is 30% less
• Requirement definition is 25% less
• Testing Effort is 10% less

These figures come courtesy of Galorath Inc. a research company that conducted a study into developing with force.com versus traditional development.  This got me thinking.

Back in February, Nancy posted a blog entry about the new Forrester report into the Total Economic Impact of the OpenEdge Platform.  When you look at the outcome of this report there are some striking conclusions :

• Developing with OpenEdge is 40% more  productive than alternative platforms
• Application Delivery with OpenEdge is 30% faster to market than when using an alternative platform
• Support staff productivity gain is 80% with OpenEdge as compared to alternative platforms

Interesting, no?  So when you compare OpenEdge to what is in most people's minds the 800lb gorilla in the SaaS world and a thoroughly modern platform, not only do you get a more than favorable comparison, you are actually better positioned.  Why?  Well what's the one big thing Force.com doesn't allow you to do? Deploy outside of Force! Whereas with OpenEdge you have the freedom to deploy pretty much anywhere, be that on premise, a traditional hosting model or indeed in the Cloud.

So good readers, I put it to you that OpenEdge is not only the open equivalent of something such as force.com, but indeed is the leading platform for developing modern SaaS applications where you get to decide how to best deploy it based upon your business model.   

Apples' iPad, the Cloud in the palm of your hand?

Unless you've been living under a rock in the past 24 hours, it can't have escaped your notice that after months, if not years of speculation and rumor, Apple has finally announced its tablet device, the iPad.  And let me just say up front that my inner geek is showing definite signs of techno-lust!  Yesterday, as I watched the news come in on my iPhone while travelling, a colleague turned to me and asked 'What I'd use it for?'.  My initial response was, 'Use it for, that's not the point, I just want it.  I'll figure out a use for it later!'.

But later in the day, I sat down to watch the video of the launch event and did start to ask myself, 'What would I use it for?'  During the press event, the phrase 'Internet in the palm of your hand' was used repeatedly by Steve Jobs & co., and that got me thinking.  The way in which you can browse using multi-touch and gesture based input certainly offers an intuitive, simple and natural way to interact with a browser, let alone the native applications. The extra screen real estate of the iPad over the iPhone also makes it a more viable browsing device.  Add 3G into the mix along with Wi-Fi and you have a very viable, portable, gesture based, easy to use, always connected device.  Now doesn't that sound like the ultimate Cloud access device?  So not only do you have the 'Internet in the palm of your hand', you now have the 'Cloud in the palm of your hand'.

So what do you think? Am I simply trying to justify buying another device to add to my already long laundry list of iPhone, MacBook Pro, PSP, PS3, etc, etc...or is the iPad a genuine new class of device, the ultimate Cloud client access device.  Let me know in the comments below.

Mike

    

Webinar Reminder

Hi

Just a quick reminder about the SaaS & Cloud Webinar that's happening tomorrow, Oct 28th.  See Nancy's post below for more details.

Mike

Australia The Tour, Part 3: Melbourne

So Melbourne was the 3rd and final stop for this years Australia Exchange.  It's certainly been a different experience from the usual 3 day get together, and from what I can tell it seems to have been a big hit with those who attended.  Many of whom were able to attend for the first time due to the show coming to them, as opposed to the other way round!

Once we'd recovered from the weather shock we had a little downtime before the show started on the Friday.  I must admit from a personal point of view, having the travel day in between each of the session days has been huge bonus, otherwise the schedule would have been a killer.  So it was good to hit the gym, and for those that know me and have just fallen off their chairs, yes I went to the gym and ran!! Not very quick, admittedly, but hey something's better than nothing, right?

Not wishing to sound like a broken record, but just like the other cities, Melbourne was a complete sell-out which was great to see.  There's nothing worse than presenting to yourself!!  Once again the main themes presented certainly seemed to hit the right notes, with Multi-Tenancy and RIA peaking the most interest.  I must admit I've been pleasantly surprised by the reaction to the Multi-tenancy proposal, even by those who don't yet see SaaS as a big play for them today.

I was also reminded on this trip that I sometimes get so focused and involved into something that I often forget that not everyone is as obsessed as I am.  During this trip one of the topics that I mentioned time & time again during each day was Amazon EC2.  Currently living in the US I guess I take it for granted that in the IT world at least, people know that Amazon have a cloud strategy, even if they don't know the specific terms, so it was sobering to be asked at one of the after conference cocktail party's  if I was talking about the same Amazon that simply sold books!  It just shows it's good to get out of that ivory tower as much as possible!!!

The one common story from all the cities, and one that shows we still have a better job to do was around Progress Communities.  I was surprised how any people either hadn't really heard of it or didn't realize what it is.  Don't get me wrong there were many people who'd used it and got value from it, but it seemed there were more that hadn't.  That surprises me because if you're an OpenEdge user, Progress Communities is the key place for you to discover a huge amount of information relating to the product and best practices.  It's our main vehicle to deliver valuable content to you as users, and a mechanism by which you can post questions and comments around anything OpenEdge related.  In fact there are people within Progress, such as myself, who as part of their job are expected to participate in the activity that's going on, so if you do have a question or comment, the chances are the person who responds is more than likely the person responsible for that area of the product or maybe even implemented it!  I really do encourage you all to take a look, but don't just to look, participate.  

I'd like to take this opportunity to firstly thank all those who attended the sessions over the 3 days.  I realize it's not always easy to leave the office, especially in these current economic times, but without you the sessions would have been nothing.  I'd also like to thank the whole Progress Australia team for their hospitality during our visit.  There are too many names to call out individually but as always they made a long trip so much fun in addition to all the hard work.

Oh, and the highlight of the trip back, meeting will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas in the 'Chilli's To Go' at LAX.  Shelley even got his autograph.  See how we just mingle with the stars here at Progress!!!

'I've got a feeling' its time to go :)

Thanks for reading

Mike