Business Making Progress

Holy Cloud! Thousands of Customers & Hundreds of Partners

At parties, I do everything I can to avoid talking about work. But, when forced, people eventually ask where I work. When I tell them Progress Software, it's usually followed by "No, we're actually a big public company that does more than databases."

I bet you didn't know we had thousands of SaaS customers in production using our products... Well we do!

And, by the way, it makes a great opportunity for each of those to use Actional for both cloud governance and inter-mediation for customer-specific policy and really flexible standards-based application layer security. If we never sold a new logo, we could still grow like weeds. Our tiny competitors are struggling to survive the recession after raising tons of money their investors will never see again, and we're in a position to thrive by delighting our existing customer base. Awesome.

And not only do we have thousands of customers, we have hundreds of partners adding vertical value to our software solutions.

That partner thing. It's big here.

Why does it work so well for us? Well, that's a huge thanks to the culture of collaboration here at Progress. Actually, it's more than that. It's like an open source attitude towards collaboration (even when we're creating commercial products). We listen, we adapt, and we learn.

We're a day away from the end of our fiscal year, and things are really crazy as you'd expect as we close our year end business. This has been a real transitional year for Progress and another successful year for Actional:

1. We've absorbed IONA and Mindreef, and rolled out new products around integrating those technologies with Actional.
2. We've received top recognition from Gartner and Forrester analysts, and Forrester even delivered a few use cases demonstrating hard ROI numbers around Actional deployments at our production customers in finance and telco.
3. We've delivered another major release update, demonstrating Actional's capabilities well beyond traditional web-services based SOA by integrating Progress OpenEdge, SAP ABAP, IONA Orbix IIOP, Spring, and Microsoft BizTalk orchestration support.
4. We've weathered a very bad economy, and we're quite well positioned for a very strong 2010 with our top-selling Business Transaction Assurance offering.

Exploration of Apama 4.2 Feature Set Podcast

Louis Lovas, Chief Architect of Progress Apama, discusses aspects of the Apama 4.2 release that focus on application developer productivity and how Apama enhances an organization’s ability to built event-driven applications.

SOA Upgrade to British Airways

British Airways (BA) is turning to service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Progress Software to connect over 600 different electronic systems and processes involved in getting BA passengers in the air.

BA has more than 250 key applications distributed over 300 locations around the globe, which explains why they chose Progress. From an integration perspective, Progress® Sonic ESB® excels in those scenarios that require the integration and management of hundreds or even thousands of systems. One Progress customer was able to deploy its integration backbone out to 25 locations a day (and can update them in a fraction of that time).

One can only guess how many of those 250 systems are touched when you travel BA. Everything from choosing your seat assignment to charging your credit card (once only please), to selecting a vegan meal is managed via systems. And let's hope those systems succeed in keeping track of your luggage.

The real-time data synchronization of Progress® DataXtend® Semantic Integrator (SI) allows BA to significantly improves information quality while reducing costs associated with data replication. And Progress® Actional® SOA Management provides BA with the visibility they need to make sure your reservation gets booked and you make it to your destination in a timely manner. Weather permitting, of course. ;)

Thanks to SOA, BA is able to extend the features of its e-commerce site right through to its airports, allowing greater self-service functionality and 'plug and play' capability to over 25,000 users.

"Moving this to a highly automated environment is a challenge, but SOA quickly proved itself to be the right approach to achieving our goal of a fully agile environment."

So the next time you take your family to London (or Disney - that's my family's destination of choice at the moment), think about how many transactions went right along the way, automatically.

I love when technology makes a tangible difference. Pretty cool stuff.

British Airways Selects Progress SOA to Upgrade the Travel Experience

British Airways announced yesterday that they had selected Progress Software for a revolutionary project that is integrating more than 600 different electronic systems and processes which are involved in getting BA passengers in the air.  This new highly automated infrastructure will bring increased agility to the airline. Rollouts will be easier, and associated cost and time will be reduced.

As is often the case with these kinds of announcements, however, it wasn’t really news to an “insider” like me.  I had visited BA earlier in the year and met with numerous people in the organization from the CTO to Architects and Developers on a number of the projects where they are implementing our technologies.  The thing that was most gratifying to me in those meetings wasn’t the scope of this cutting edge project or even that they were implementing using nearly our entire portfolio of SOA infrastructure products, namely Progress® Sonic® ESB, Progress® Actional® for SOA Management and Progress® DataXtend® Semantic Integrator (SI).  It was that, at every level in the organization, they expressed how pleased they were in the selection of Progress.  

At the senior executive level, they were discussing the partnership that they had developed with Progress and the vision we had provided to address real business challenges, for example, improving customer service by extending the features of BA’s e-commerce website into airports.  At the architecture level, there was a great sense of partnership on how the products we provided could be brought together in a coherent SOA based approach to their infrastructure that increases agility and operational responsiveness.  The developers were just happy that it really was “best of breed” technology that “just works”.  

At a time when most airlines are cutting back, it’s great to see British Airways taking advantage of what SOA has to offer and at every level of the organization they can count on Progress as a trusted partner to help.

Have you deployed your NGMP yet?

WIN has! After doing a review of their technology, WIN and their technology partner, Tech Mahindra, selected Progress® Sonic® ESB as their Next Generation Messaging Platform (NGMP). Because rapid change in the mobile sector is driving consumer demand for innovative multimedia and high-bandwidth services, they needed to look at a service-based infrastructure (or SOA) for its new platform. Here’s a quote from our recent press release:

“As mobile services evolve into widgets, applications and mobile video on-demand, much of the integration work we do to meet our customers’ service requirements is custom-built,” Graham Rivers, CEO at WIN, explained. “But to create an efficient and agile model that allows providers to roll out new services quickly, service re-use is key. SOA brings that flexibility to our platform.”

For many companies today, SOA is a significant part of improving infrastructure response. But superior operational responsiveness and SOA deployment require innovative technology to be effective. WIN knew that in order to remain competitive and deliver the best solutions and services to their customers, including Vodafone, T-Mobile, and Sony Ericsson, their NGMP needed to deliver high performance and reliable communications. Sonic ESB gives WIN the power they need to meet customer demands and deploy an event-driven architecture that will scale with technology and innovation.

Worried About Business Transaction Failure?

Besides costing you money, each failed transaction diminishes customer experience, and can even push your customers to competitors. We just released an Infographic that shows how Progress® Actional’s patented architecture and other key differentiators work to preserve the health of all transactions. It will allow you to see exactly what makes Actional unique, and how transactions are automatically discovered and tracked in a typical process flow. 

With improved business transaction management, you will:

• Enable centralized management and distributed policy enforcement for a cost-effective solution;
• Achieve real time exception management to diagnose and repair transaction problems quickly;
• Get the ability to optimize and create quality services before they are deployed.

WANT TO LEARN MORE? Download the PDF our Business Transaction Assurance Infographic. You can also register to get our E-kit which includes insightful papers and an E-book that will help you ensure that your web services never fail.

Putting the Smart in Smart Grid

Listen to learn about the critical role of Event Processing in reshaping the delivery of energy and services to your customers.

Event Processing in Location-based Services

Business is event-driven. No. Wait. Life is event-driven, and if it wasn’t, we’d be walking into walls and every sentence would start with “Oops.” Life would be a string of missed opportunities. We’ve done a masterful job of using technology to transform our business processes into software, but one tenet that’s been missing is that business should imitate life. Sense and respond is what’s been missing.

We recently announced that match2blue (http://web.progress.com/inthenews/match2blue-stands-ou-11092009.html) will be using the event processing capabilities of Apama to provide location-based services in social networking. Sense and respond is crucial for their ability to enable like-minded people to connect in real-time. Traditional data processing technology and its normal rhythm of “capture, store, analyze” can’t, well, keep up. And in a world where latency leads to missed opportunities, match2blue is proving that through the right technology business can imitate life.

Responding to business events as they happen is what will define your competitive advantage.

Business is event-driven, indeed.

In defence of high frequency trading

The high frequency trading (HFT) debate seems to have entered a new and worrying phase in the UK. On Tuesday this week in an interview with the BBC, Lord Myners, the UK’s financial services minister, warned that high frequency trading had “gone too far” and that share ownership had “now lost its supporting function for the provision of capital to business”. (You can find the original interview here and reports of it in the Financial Times and The Independent yesterday).

 

 Mary Schapiro, head of the SEC, signalled at the end of October that a number of electronic trading areas were going to be looked into – naked access (where a broker sponsors a firm to have direct electronic access to an exchange), dark pools and high frequency trading.

 

It does seem now that on both sides of the Atlantic, governments and regulators are steeling themselves to act and softening the markets up to be able to accept the fact that electronic trading might have some limits.

 

The concern is that governments and regulators are going to come down too hard on electronic trading and the benefits that it gives investors will be damaged.

 

It all started with the flash order issue in the US a few months ago. Commentators were linking together various different, although related issues, in an inappropriate way. Flash orders seemed to be viewed sometimes as being synonymous with HFT, both of which were sometimes reported as forms of market abuse. All three topics are quite different. In my opinion, there are legitimate questions over the use of flash orders and a proposal to ban them is now being considered.

 

Dark pools, where large blocks of stock are traded off exchange to minimise market impact, have been the next targets. There are, again, legitimate issues. Dark pools, by their very nature, do not have good price transparency. Regulators have become concerned with their use because more and more trading is going through dark pools. Some estimates put this at between 10% and 30% in Europe and the US. This lack of knowledge about what exactly is the proportion is part of the problem itself. No one really knows what proportion of trading dark pools is taking. If a significant proportion of the market has no price transparency then this undermines the notion of a fair market for all. Regulators are looking at this and its likely that they will force dark pool operators to disclose far more information about what is being traded than they do currently. The SEC is considering limiting the proportion of a stock that can be traded through dark pools to a small percentage.

 

These legitimate issues however risk skewing the whole HFT debate to one where people will conclude that “HFT is bad”.

 

What people are now describing as HFT – the very fast and frequent, computer assisted trading of, usually, equities – is an evolution of something that has been happening in the market place for at least the last 10 years. In this time electronic trading has proliferated, not just in equities but also in all asset classes such as derivatives, bonds and foreign exchange. Far more venues for trading have been created. There are now many places where a company’s stock can be traded both in the US and Europe. This has brought competition and choice. Prices have been lowered, improving access to retail investors. Spreads have narrowed. Arbitrage opportunities are harder to find, which mean that market information is disseminating faster which, in turn, means that price transparency has improved. Because there is more trading going on, there is more liquidity available, which also means keener prices.

 

A key part of the HFT trend has been the use of algorithmic trading (the most prevalent use of complex event processing technology). Algo trading models fall broadly into one of two camps: alpha seeking, where market prices are examined to find a trading opportunity that will make money, and execution where orders are, usually, split up into smaller parts and then traded automatically in the market in an intelligent way to find good prices and to ensure those prices are not overly influenced by the trades being made themselves. For each type of model it can be very useful to react very quickly to market information, either to take advantage of a price discrepancy or to quickly pickup liquidity at a good price. Algorithmic trading is enormously beneficial for those who use it and its use is not limited to specialist hedge funds. Most algorithmic trading uses execution models that find liquidity, good prices, help minimise market impact and, lastly, increase significantly a trader’s productivity. Instead of wasting time executing several simple orders in the market over the course of many minutes or hours, the trader can simply ask a machine to do it. The trader can then spend time either covering more of the market (useful in straitened economic times) or spend more time actually delivering real value to a client.

 

Algorithmic trading and HFT have brought very significant benefits. It is these benefits that must not be threatened.

 

Trading has always involved cunning and guile, whether human or computer based. Competition has always existed in who’s got the best traders and trading systems. Organisations investing in ultra low-latency infrastructure to ensure orders arrive at an exchange in microseconds (not nanoseconds as sometimes claimed by the way – light travels 30cm in 1 nanosecond which isn’t far enough to be very useful) are part of this competitive world. Competition leads to innovation and it is this innovation that has brought so many of the benefits described above. Computer-based models can somtimes be used abusively. There are many forms of market abuse that regulators and exchange operators look for. Some exchanges and regulators have been investing in real-time surveillance technology (Progress counts Turquoise and the UK Financial Services Authority as customers using Apama) to ensure that they can spot abusive patterns of behaviour quickly.

 

We can’t start slowing trading down. We can’t go backwards and put the electronic trading genie back in the bottle. We don’t want to lose all the benefits that have come. Rather, regulators and exchanges should concentrate on ensuring maximum transparency in how markets operate and ensure that those attempting to maliciously abuse the markets are dissuaded or caught.

 

Apama 4.2 Deeper Exploration: Enhanced Support for Parallelism

In this podcast Louis Lovas, Apama Architect, discusses some of the details of the enhanced parallelism that is now available in Progress Apama 4.2.

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Alphameric Beats the Odds with Progress Software

It’s always great when a company is willing to talk publicly about your products and services, even when the public statement incorporates a bad pun. In this case, Alphameric Solutions Ltd., the leading technology provider to the bookmaking marketplace in the UK and Ireland, wasn’t holding their cards close to their chest when they decided to collaborate with us on a press release. Alphameric selected the Progress® Sonic® ESB to revolutionize the way they handle content and messages across their network because they couldn’t roll the dice with unreliable infrastructure. Sonic’s continuous availability architecture made this a sure bet.

With new virtual games such as poker and fantasy football being released every day, Alphameric was struggling to manually keep all the feeds and databases up to date. The new SOA-based approach makes accomplishing those tasks a lead pipe lock. Alphameric can now change data more quickly, easily bring new feeds online, without gambling with the accuracy through automation.

Using Progress, Alphameric is achieving operational responsiveness, increasing revenue and improving customer service to finish in the money. You can’t beat that. I’d add that this decision puts them clearly ahead of the game, but Matt Smith, our Senior Enterprise Architect quoted in the press release, beat me to the finish on that one.

OK, I think I got that out of my system now. Sorry about that...

CORBA is now Actional-ized!

This is really cool, and I can finally speak about it. Wow, gag orders just don't work very well for me. I mean, I can keep a secret, it's just that the really juicy ones are harder to keep than the others! And, this one's juicy. Ready...

Today we will release Orbix 6.3.4 with support for Actional.

Whoa! I bet at this point a lot of you are like SOA What? (yeah, remember that blog-ism we did here back when SOA was cool?)

Well, let me give you end-to-end visibility into the import of that sentence above.

As with all the other technologies we cover, including the recently announced SAP ABAP integration, Actional integration with Orbix gives customers:

1. End-to-end message flow visibility across an entire CORBA environment, in run-time, without any impact on performance or scalability. That same visibility extends beyond CORBA, and does so consistently to provide a unified view of message flows and business transactions in their environment.
2. The ability to centralize run-time policy creation, allow for distributed enforcement across multiple environments, and to ensure compliance with corporate and regulatory policies across the entire messaging infrastructure.
3. The same tools our current customers have that help them achieve an 80% reduction in time to resolving critical production incidents and a 20% reduction in major production incidents per year by simplifying root-cause analysis and problem resolution.

Now, you might think with all these great benefits, there would be a high cost. Nuh uh!!!

• No additional coding changes to get this up and running. Instrumentation of all CORBA services is automatic.
• No architecture changes, Actional won't impact scalability.
• No extra capacity required, Actional won't impact performance.
• No additional staff are required, dependencies are dynamically discovered and maintained to help keep the cost of ownership low. In fact, case studies independently verified by Forrester Research of our customers who are in production showed a rather quick payback of the investment due, in part, to the low cost of ownership.

Of course, if you follow Actional and Progress at all, awesome technology is old news. Actional has been working on non-SOA distributed applications since early in the development of our product and anytime we add a new technology, protocol, or platform, we've always added the same rich features, while maintaining the enterprise-class performance. Let me say that again, because I've accidentally brought up a very important point.

The single Actional Agent adds all of the functionality, across all of the protocols and platforms, and provides the same outstanding performance you've come to expect from us. In contrast, many other vendors can support all the platforms/protocols, and all the business-transaction-management features, and do so non-intrusively... but THEY CAN'T DO IT ALL AT THE SAME TIME!

Back on track, sorry for the diversion. I'm almost done here, I promise.

There are other equally interesting implications from this release that I'd like to share (in no particular order).

1. This helps to, in part, validate the strategy that lead us to acquire IONA in the first place. There are a lot of cross-product synergies.
2. This continues to prove the applicability of our technology far beyond the common understanding of SOA infrastructure (SOA and HTTP/JMS). We have successfully broken out of the "SOA management" niche, and are providing real value to customers across the entire breadth of business transaction management needs.
3. In this "recovering" economy, Progress can help customers gain more value from their legacy technology investments by upgrading the capabilities in mission critical platforms like Orbix/CORBA. Whether it's from the operational perspective of lowering their operating costs while providing higher-levels of service, or from the business perspective of preventing "revenue leakage", Actional solves real-world problems without impacting the architecture or requiring coding changes to existing applications.

In closing, I wish I could share some of the early adopter customer quotes here. I can't, but the feedback from the (former) IONA field was equally funny. The IONA field is (relatively) new to Progress and hasn't necessarily developed the instant-automatic love for each-and-every Progress product because we all share a logo color scheme. We actually had to prove ourselves to these guys and gals (a very capable team I might add). Once the engineering team was finished, they took the early software and implemented it at some rather large (and equally skeptical) customers. After running it through it's paces, people were actually smiling. When was the last time you saw beta users smiling at performance results? To quote one guy working at a large airline... "it simply worked the way it should."

Beat that!