Business Making Progress

Progress Software Announces Q4 results - Here are some highlights

Progress Software (NASDAQ: PRGS) just announced their Q4 earnings release. To summarize, it says "Earnings Up in Q4; Progress® Actional® Revenue Up with Triple-Digit Growth; Progress® Apama® Revenue Up with Double-Digit Growth." What I really thought was interesting was the Q4 highlights. The majority of wins involve building or enhancing an integrated infrastructure, and application modernization - both topics we cover in this blog. In case you missed the release, I've included these highlights below. Enjoy!

Q4 Highlights

• Progress Software announced that the Progress® Sonic® ESB (enterprise service bus) is deployed and operational at British Airport Authority’s (BAA) Heathrow Airport Terminal 5.
  
  The Progress solution enables BAA to provide airport integration capabilities using the Sonic ESB product. This includes the creation of reusable integration services for new Terminal 5 systems and of specialist adaptors for the integration of existing key operational BAA systems, such as the Airport Operational Database Integration. (Tag: Application Integration)
  
  
• Progress Software has successfully enabled more than 250 Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to deploy thousands of on-demand, SaaS applications over the past five years.  These ISVs use the Progress® OpenEdge® SaaS platform to build applications that are used in some of the most demanding and diverse business environments in the world. (Tag: Cloud Computing)
  
  
• British Airways selected Progress Software SOA Solutions to upgrade their travel experience.  The UK’s largest international airline, British Airways (BA), will use the Progress portfolio of SOA solutions as a key part of its travel program to upgrade its IT systems by integrating over 600 different electronic systems and processes involved in getting BA passengers in the air. The flexibility of the Progress SOA portfolio allows BA to extend the features of its e-commerce site right through to its airports, by allowing greater self-service functionality and 'plug and play' capability. (Tag: SOA Success)
  
• match2blue stands out from the crowd with the Progress® Apama® Business Event Processing (BEP) platform by adding real-time capability to next-generation social networking. Enterprise platform enabler for mobile solutions, match2blue (www.match2blue.com), has selected the Apama platform to empower its social networking platform with real-time information on location, ideas, news and trends.  The Apama BEP platform will form a crucial part of match2blue’s back-end infrastructure, providing the performance and scalability needed, as well as supporting its business partners, who will be operating the location-based services to control and monitor their operations through dashboards. (Tag: Complex Event Processing)
  
  
• Alphameric Solutions Ltd, the leading solutions provider to the gaming industry, selected the Sonic ESB to revolutionize the way it handles content and messages across its network. Relying on highly complex and automated processes to deliver odds, prices, race information and documents across a distributed architecture – most needing to be handled in a sub-hundred millisecond timeframe – Alphameric needed a simpler way to incorporate new or updated information in real-time. (Tag: SOA Best Practices)
  
• West Bend Mutual Insurance Company has selected the Sonic ESB (enterprise service bus) and Actional products to underpin a service-oriented architecture (SOA) based IT infrastructure.   West Bend Mutual Insurance, a property and casualty insurance carrier, is pulling together dozens of disparate internal policy administration applications into a single integrated insurance portal. (Tag: Distributed SOA)
  
• Progress Software announced the availability of the Apama 4.2 Event Processing Platform.  The Apama 4.2 release extends the capabilities of the previously announced Apama Parallel Correlator, and introduces significant new developer productivity features that accelerate the deployment of event processing applications. The Apama Parallel Correlator leverages multi-core, multi-processor hardware to deliver high throughput, low latency execution that has achieved seven-fold performance improvements, as benchmarked with real-world customer applications. (Tag: Event Driven SOA)
  
• Slumberland, a leading furniture retailer, is now using standards-based data connectivity products from Progress® DataDirect® for reliable, high-performance support for all their major databases and 64-bit operating systems, for reliable connectivity to their Oracle applications, and streamlined reporting to improve fulfillment and customer satisfaction. (Tag: Semantic Data Integration)
  
• Progress unveiled the industry's first mainframe SQL engine for non-relational data, which can leverage zIIP specialty processors for lowering a mainframe’s total cost of ownership (TCO), with the announcement of its DataDirect Shadow Release 7.2.1.  The DataDirect Shadow release includes ANSI SQL-92 to Non-Relational Data with zIIP Offload and new capabilities that lower costs and attract new process-intense workloads to the mainframe.

My Baby Has Grown Up

I was proud to recently be appointed CTO and head Corporate Development here at Progress Software http://web.progress.com/en/inthenews/progress-software-ap-12102009.html. But I don’t want anyone to take that as an indication that I won’t still be involved with event processing – au contrair. Event processing (whether you call it CEP or BEP) is now a critical part of enterprise software systems – I couldn’t avoid it if I tried!!

But taking a broader role does give me cause to reflect upon the last few years and look back at the growth of event processing and the Progress Apama business. Here are some observations:

• It’s incredibly rare to have the pioneer in a space also be the leader when the space matures. I’m really proud that Progress Apama achieved that. Our former CEO Joe Alsop has a saying that “you don’t want to be a pioneer; they’re the ones with the arrows in their backs!” Usually he’s right on that one – but in the case of Progress Apama, the first is still the best! Independent analysts, including Forrester and IDC, all agree on it. Our customers agree on it too.
• It’s tough at the top! I had no idea that when you are the leader in a space, many other firms’ technology and marketing strategies are based completely around you. I have met ex-employees of major software companies that have told me that there are Apama screenshots posted on the walls of their ex firms’ development centers – the goal being to try to replicate them or even improve on them. Other firms’ marketing has often been based on trying to criticize Apama and say why they are better – so their company name gets picked up by search engines when people search for Apama.
• Event processing has matured and evolved. Yes it is certainly used to power the world’s trading systems. But it’s also used to intelligently track and respond to millions of moving objects, like trucks, ships, planes, packages and people. It’s used to detect fraud in casinos and insider trading. It’s used to detect revenue leakage in telecommunications and continually respond to opportunities and threats in supply chain, logistics, power generation and manufacturing. It enables firms to optimize their businesses for what’s happening now and is about to happen – instead of running solely in the rear view mirror.
• Despite all the new application areas, Capital Markets remains a very important area for event processing. Critical trading operations in London, New York and around the world are architected on event processing platforms. The world’s economy is continually becoming more real-time, needs to support rapid change and now needs to support the real-time views of risk and compliance. We recognize the importance of Capital Market. My congratulations to Richard Bentley who takes on the mantle of General Manager of Capital Markets to carry on Progress Apama’s industry-leading work in this space. With his deep knowledge and experience with both Apama and Capital Markets, Richard is uniquely placed to carry on the solutions-oriented focus that has been the foundation to Progress Apama’s success.
• Even in a terrible economy, the value of event processing has been proven – to manage costs, prevent revenue leakage and increase revenue.  Progress announced our fourth quarter results today http://web.progress.com/en/inthenews/progress-software-an-12222009.html which saw a double digit increase for Apama and triple digit for Actional. Apama and Actional are used, increasingly together, to gain visibility of business processes without modifying applications, to turn business process activity into events and to respond to opportunities and threats represented by event patterns – enabling the dynamic optimization of business performance.
• But one thing I do believe: that soon there will be no such thing as a pure-play CEP vendor. CEP is part of something bigger. We’ve achieved the first mission, which is to raise the profile of event processing as a new technique that can solve hitherto unsolvable problems. Now the follow on mission is to ensure event processing finds its way into every solution and business empowerment platform. It is one of a set of key technologies that together will change the world.

I wish everyone Happy Holidays and a successful and profitable 2010 !!!

Predictions for 2010

Last week we published some predictions for capital markets would evolve in 2010. I’d like to say a bit more about them.

Firstly, we predict there will be a big uptake of the use of technology for regulatory compliance and enforcement. Whilst the turmoil of the last 18 months was primarily caused by the over-the-counter, credit derivatives market, the effects of increased regulatory scrutiny are being felt throughout the trading industry. The power and authority of regulators has been bolstered, exchanges and alternative trading venues understand there is a greater need to monitor trading activity, and brokers and buy-side firms want to monitor and control their own and their clients’ trading activities better. There has been a significant debate in the media in the last few months on the merits of high frequency trading and variants of. This started in the specialist trade media, then made it to mainstream news outlets such as the BBC and it has been a topic deemed sufficiently important to be discussed by members of the US Congress and the British government. This has resulted in pressure on market participants to really up their game as far as trade monitoring is concerned. So how will technology be used to better enforce regulation and control over trading activity? Let’s start with the liquidty venues – the exchanges, the MTFs, the ECNs and the dark pools. Regulated exchanges in advanced markets generally do real-time monitoring of trading activity already to spot patterns of market abusive behaviour. They will need to continue to invest to ensure that they have the technology that can scale and be flexible enough to evolve with  changing patterns of trading behaviour. In contrast, exchanges in emerging markets do not often have adequate monitoring systems. This will change – we’re seeing substantial interest in Apama for exchange surveillance in less developed markets.  At the other end of the liquidity spectrum, the regulation around dark pools will change. It is likely that there will be limits imposed on the proportion of stock that can be traded through dark pools and operators will need to to disclose more information. Furthermore, regulators will insist that dark pool operators prove they have adequate monitoring systems in place. It won’t be just a paper exercise – they’ll have to prove it. Brokers will be in a similar position. Each participant in the trading cycle in the UK, for example, has a responsibility to ensure that the market is working fairly. The UK regulator, the FSA, is putting pressure on brokers to show that they have proper trade monitoring technology in place so customer and internal flow can be understood better.

Let’s move on to hosted services. “Cloud computing” is certainly a term du jour. What does it mean for capital markets? The first thing to say is that cloud computing, as in the provision of hosted software and computing resources, is a very familiar technology concept in capital markets, even though until recently people may not have used the term “cloud computing”. Anyone using a Reuters market data feed, or passing over orders over FIX to a broker, or accessing a single bank foreign exchange portal, is accessing services in the cloud. In fact electronic trading relies to a great extent upon cloud services. In 2010 however, more hosted services of a richer functional nature are going to become available. Instead of just building blocks – the market data, the DMA access etc. – more services will become available for algorithmic trading and risk management. Brokers do offer hosted algo services already, but they are broker specific. An example of a hosted algo service is one we launched with CQG recently. These will mature and broaden their scope. These types of services are invaluable to mid-sized trading organisations who can’t, or don’t want to, build a whole range of systems themselves.

Lastly, our prediction about emerging markets. We’re seen significant growth this year in demand for Apama in Brazil, India and China. Brazil particularly, because of continued economic growth and market liberalisation, has led the way (for example, Progress has 15 customers using Apama in Brazil now). India and China are getting there. They have further to go in market liberalisation to fuel the demand for algorithmic trading, but to attract extra investment and liquidity to their domestic markets they’ll be left with little choice. Hong Kong is an exception – algorithmic trading is used extensively both by global and regional players and it provides a window onto developed markets that mainland China can learn from.

Capital markets will evolve quickly in 2010, as in every year. That's what makes it such an interesting area to work in.

Now That's a Real Forklift Upgrade

I have to admit... I don’t really know how our customers use OpenEdge. I do know there are a ton of customers - over 65,000. And, if that weren’t enough, there are over 1,500 partners too. What's more, many of them are in-production with SaaS offerings.

Damn, that’s a lot.

(If any analysts are reading... just think about the opportunity of selling Actional into that installed base even if we never got another “new logo” sale.)

This week’s press release follows on from several months of a beta period where about 20 or 30 OpenEdge customers tested the newly released Actional integration.

As TVH Forklift Parts realized, knowing what’s happening in their integrated infrastructure, and being able to assure a consistent level of service has tremendous value to a distributed and shared infrastructure.

Why is this important?

It’s about the business context. Without that context, solutions are just technology (we have good technology too… but that’s not enough).

That’s the difference between assurance and management. Assurance implies business-technology coordination to achieve a business result. Management implies your technical components are up and running. Big whoop. Just today I spent 2 hours on the phone with T-Mobile. All the technical components were up, but it still wasn’t working. I know you can relate.

Colleen points out that our partners are being viewed more and more as business partners, not just technology providers. Simply put, our partners need technology to understand the business impact of “events” within their infrastructure.

Understanding the business impact means that we (technology infrastructure providers) need to provide an awareness of the business context when problems occur. The only way to do that is to track business context all the time.

I’ve heard a few times recently of prospects who have a “competitive” solution in place to track business assurance… but when I probe, it seems they don’t run it all the time because (pick one):

1. It impacts performance of my applications. (it doesn’t scale)
2. It collects too much information. (it doesn’t scale)
3. It requires too much CPU on my app servers. (it doesn’t scale)

I don’t understand how people think a solution that doesn’t run all the time can do the job.

Let me rephrase.

If it’s not running all the time and collecting context of your business, how are you using the context of the business to make better run-time decisions?

Simply put, you’re not.

I’m glad to welcome TVH Forklift Parts to the Actional family. And, if you’re reading, thanks for sharing your story.

Open Source Software Powers the Biggest Physics Project in History

Today Progress Software announced that the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN*) is using Progress® FUSE™, to run its operational grid activities of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) re-launch which happened this month. FUSE is an open source product line based on several Apache projects for which IONA (acquired by Progress in June 2008) provided leadership and Progress today continues to be a significant contributor. There are many skeptics that believe open source software isn’t meant for large-scale projects but CERN has proven that wrong. Not only has FUSE will underpin all grid monitoring systems used in CERN’s quest to find the Higgs Boson—known as 'The God Particle', but CERN welcomes the opportunity to contribute back to the open source project and deploy it freely across all their sites.

James Casey, Technical Architect at CERN, sites “We needed to find a partner that could help us bring agility and reliability to our IT infrastructure.” He added, “We have a pipeline of projects that we need to deliver over the coming years, so this first step lays the foundation for change.”

In addition to using FUSE, CERN also deployed Progress® SonicMQ® to form the communications backbone of its Technical Infrastructure Monitoring (TIM) system, designed to alert researchers in the event of an emergency. The use of open and “closed” source software creates a true open integration environment that re-enforces the fact that every organization has the power to choose the solutions that best fit their integrated infrastructure requirements.

Meet Progress Software On The Road Next Week

Before we jump into the swing of holiday shopping, celebrations and announcing year end numbers, we're hitting the road. If you are attending Gartner AADI in Las Vegas or Management World Americas in Orlando, make sure to take time visit us. Here's where Progress Software will be:

7 - 9 December 2009
Las Vegas, NV
Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit
This is the year's MUST ATTEND conference on Cloud Computing, SOA and Applications. Regardless of your challenge, you'll find answers that fit your needs in today's changed environment. And the best part... Progress Software is going to be there, at Booth #3. As a platinum sponsor, we'll be speaking about how our customer, Sallie Mae, used event-driven architecture to transform their IT department into a strategic partner for its business.

> Learn more!

8 - 10 December 2009
Orlando, FL
Management World Americas
In addition to visiting us at Management World Americas in Booth #112 during exhibition hours, you can see how DataXtend SI and Apama are being used in three TM Forum Catalyst projects. As part of the show's Forumville event, they are featuring five Themed Zones that focus on key areas for customers, services and networks – all driving towards optimizing business performance. See our products in action!

> Reserve your FREE book!

HOPE TO SEE YOU!

How to Build an Algorithm

Colleague Dan Hubscher, who is also a frequent contributor to this blog, can be found illustrating some of the capabilities of the Apama development environment's Apama Event Modeler in this Reuters video.   With our recent 4.2 release, we significantly enhanced the Apama development capabilities overall, as we have discussed in the blog previously. But Event Modeler's ability to empower the business user (e.g. business analyst) to create event processing applications like algorithmic trading represents a longstanding feature of the Apama platform.   Those interesting in seeing it "live", are encouraged to contact us for a demonstration.  The picture refers to a metaphor that Dan used in the video. 

Semantic Web and the Enterprise Integration solutions

A few weeks back I was at the National (Indian) Software Products' conclave at Bangalore. There were a lot of startups that were present. The buzz was amazing (in no small measure due to the presence of Guy Kawasaki and Naeem Zafar). I was able to interact with a lot of startups (good opportunity enabled via the Startups Track that I was co-organizing at the conclave). Among many others, there were two startups that were particularly interesting and both were looking at RDF (the Web3.0 Semantic Web markup standard) use cases in Enterprise solutions - particularly for knowledge management and data mining.

Now coming to think of it, the Web3.0 approach to a semantic web also makes a lot of sense to enterprise data. Both for Intranet content and for business data. For the Intranet, this enables creating a usable 'knowledge' veneer on the static content, wikis, discussion forums and other myriad information sources in enterprise Intranets. A veneer that allows creating semantic linkages and references across these various information sources. And for business data, it will enable creating semantic linkages across business data.

Coincidentally, I came across this article (few years old) on the 'Semantic Integration' of Enterprise reporting data; the data warehouses. Here the emphasis is on SVT (Single Version of Truth), and it recommends having just one data warehouse as the master. Now wouldn't it be nice to extend the paradigm to enterprise data as well? Meaning... the OLTP database is itself the DW as well. This is not entirely unfounded. Informix, the 2nd largest UNIX DB in the 1990s (and since extinct), actually attempted this. They built DW capabilities into the OLTP database, thereby attempting to eliminate the need to have two separate databases.

While a single DB is not possible, an integrated view of the enterprise data that collates all sources is not far fetched. In fact, Progress DataXtend SI actually enables it today. The data exchanges between various applications in the enterprise is a need and reality of today - even more so in the integrated enterprise with extensive use of SOA infrastructure. To this you can add Master Data management. Now while solutions like DataXtend SI do enable a transparent access to various data sources in the enterprise with all semantics of the same modeled and preserved to present a common enterprise view of all data in the enterprise, wouldn't it be nice to extend the same further?

Consider this... with the semantics of various data sources mapped to a common enterprise view, this could be extended to allow dynamic ad hoc querying. And if this is also marked up with RDF meta data that provides linkages across applications, this will also allow semantic querying in Web 3.0 languages like Sparql. Extending this further, one could also look at getting semantic results collating this enterprise results with even sources on the web. For example: this could enable getting results for queries searching all customers that have bought high-value products from the enterprise and have CEOs that are interested in sailing. Now the list of customers is available in the CRM & Order processing system. But the information on who the CEO is may not be in the enterprise DB - this may be on the client companies website. And the fact that the CEO likes sailing may be on a social networking site. Now Web 3.0 will integrate the company site with social networking site and enable this linkage that the CEO likes sailing. And if we enable RDF within the enterprise, then that will enable the full query to find the "customers that have CEOS who like sailing".

At this point, the use case is more academic. (And some work is underway at IIIT-H). But in few years as RDF gets traction and Web3.0 usage picks up, the need for integrating enterprise data also into this semantic search space may follow. And when this occurs, the enterprise model based data integration that DXSI enables will be a strong starting point for such solutions.