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[00:00:00]
M: Welcome today's webcast. Today's call is being
recorded. And now to begin the program, I would like to introduce Black Connell. Please
go ahead, sir.
Blake Connell: Terrific. Well, thank you very much. And ladies
and gentlemen, welcome, and thank you for participating in today's webinar. We're going
to be covering some really important trends in application development, and we're really
excited about that.
My name is Blake Connell, and I'm with Progress Software. Joining me today, we're fortunate
enough to have John Rymer; he's vice president and principal analyst with Forrester Research.
John has been in the space for quite a while, and has a lot of interesting insight to share
with us. And briefly, the [00:00:45] flow for today will be that John is going to kick
us off, he'll hand it over to me, I'll run through a few slides on my end. And then I'm
going to move into sort of a live demonstration of some software that we have. And then we'll
wrap up with a Q&A. So we really have a lot of interesting and exciting things that are
happening in the app dev space. We have a packed agenda. So I'm going to send it back
over to Chris to take us through some brief housekeeping things. And then he'll move over
to John, and he'll get us kicked off. So Chris, over to you.
Chris Flack: Yeah, thank you, Blake. Much appreciated.
So welcome, everybody, to today's webcast. Thank you all for joining. Just a few quick
things before we get started with today's presentation and get -- and let John and Blake
do their thing. Just a couple quick things. So today's webcast is being recorded and archived
for future viewing and listening purposes. And we'll send you a link within 24 to 48
hours after today's webcast where you can view the replay. And feel free to share that
link with coworkers and friends who may be interested on [00:01:38] today's topic as
well. So we appreciate if you do that. Also, we will have a Q&A at the end of today's webcast.
However, we encourage you at any time during today's presentation to enter your question
via the big "Ask a question" box appearing on the left-hand side of your console. Just
feel free to submit your -- to put your question in the blank area and hit "submit." It'll
be sent off to myself, John, and Blake. And hopefully, at the end, we'll get to everybody's
questions and get out some answers.
As you saw earlier, we are joined by Blake Connell. Blake is a wonderful presenter. He
is director of product marketing for Progress Pacific. Blake helps us share alignment between
customers and product development. He generates awareness for Progress-specific platform as
a service through a variety of means, including speaking engagements at events, seminars,
webinars like this one, and social media. With more than two decades in the software
industry, Blake has spent the past 15 years in Java technology and Enterprise software.
[00:02:28] First up to day is -- oh, we're going to be joined by John Rymer. He is vice
president and principal analyst from Forrester. He is a leading expert on Enterprise Middleware.
Included in his coverage are the Java Application Service for IBM, Red Hat, JVOS, and Oracle,
as well as Microsoft.net Platform and SharePoint. He leads Forrester's application development
and delivery coverage of cloud platforms, including Microsoft Windows Azure, Amazon
web services, and Salesforce.com's platform. John is the lead analyst on Forrester's digital
experience delivery playbook. He is an authority on the enterprise strategies of IBM, Microsoft,
and Oracle, and contributes to Forrester's coverage on business, rules, platforms, and
comple-- [audio skip] complex event processing.
And with that, I'm going to ask John to get today's presentation started. So John, why
don't you take the floor and get us going?
John Rymer: [000:03:16] Thanks very much, Chris. Whoops,
let me go back. Thanks very much, Chris. And Blake, pleasure to be working with you again.
Blake and I go way back, and it's a real pleasure. So let's -- I'll kick us -- I want to kick
us off with a context, here. The question you see on the screen in front of you is a
question that we are dealing with on a daily basis with clients, and our client basis is
large enterprises and large governmental agencies. Everyone, everyone is struggling to deliver
software much, much faster. It's just at unprecedented rates. And software releases much, much more
often. And the results -- this is -- I want to talk about the causes of this crunch that
we're all in, and then some of the solutions that we've been discovering in our research,
and probing in our research, and hopefully offer you some good suggestions.
So first, the start of solving any problem is admitting you have a problem. And we do
a lot of research with a variety of IT professionals, a lot of developers, a lot of development
research, development group research. And we're just hearing that the pressure has never
been greater. And the responses, [00:04:39] sort of the old -- the tried and true techniques
are actually falling short. Coding, coding base development, techniques. You know, we
can add things like agile methods to them to try to speed them up, try to make them
more, better connected, better aligned with the business, but still people are struggling.
And we see -- we actually see the crunch here, the need to deliver software so much faster
and so much more frequently as a primary reason. It usually is the primary reason that development
organizations go to public cloud offerings like AWS and like some of the platform as
a service offerings we'll be talking about in a minute. It's not really economics as
much as it is we need to find new ways of delivering, and the cloud offering seemed
to offer some relief, you know, in that -- from that time pressure.
Now let's talk about the reasons that this crunch is on, and let's talk about the long-term
implications here. The reason, the primary reason for this crunch, this unprecedented
demand to deliver, is coming from marketing, and coming from sales, and coming from the
customer-focused parts of our enterprises. The fact is that any business service, any
business innovation, any [00:06:14] product these days requires software. Either new software,
or changes to existing software. And the demand coming from the customer-facing parts of our
business is just enormous. Just think about your daily, you know, your own life, where
you probably use and interact with a range of companies through your smartphone. Well,
that's software that was built to enable those interactions. And as you know, the apps that
we really value, you know, that all of us really value, tend to get updated quite frequently,
sometimes several times a week. You know, oftentimes, multiple times in a month. And
they're very different, and the software is very different from software we've used in
the past, as we've conducted our business. So the problem is that these applications,
this software that is customer facing, it just -- it has different properties than the
enterprise software we always built in the past.
So here's a quote from a digital marketing leader that we encountered when we were doing
our research that really highlights the problem. "The problem is that the old structures that
we used, the old techniques that we've used in IT, the [00:07:43] tooling, the platforms,
just about everything, is not optimal for these new generation of customer-facing applications,
that we are essentially set up to deliver software that is optimized for integrity,
for data integrity, and we really -- our processes are really set up to try to slow down the
flow of requirements, whereas in the world of customer-facing applications, we need to
keep pace with those requirements. We almost have to turn every one of the values we've
had in the past on their head, and go a complete 180. It's a very difficult transition that
we're all, you know, working on, and, I believe, we'll be working on for probably three to
five years before we finally get to mastery.
I just want to highlight that this is not some kind of a short-term issue that we're
going to solve and then move on. The fact is that there's plenty of evidence out there,
and here's some of what we've found. There's plenty of evidence out there that there is
a shift in spending on information technology from the back office, from those classic IT
systems that we've always built and maintained for integrity, and, you know, reliability.
You know, primarily, there's a shift in spending from those [00:09:15] kinds of applications
to customer-facing applications. This is data from a survey that we did where asked people
about the percentage of their spend. Not the IT budget, because the IT spend usually is
much larger than the IT budget. There's IT spending going on in marketing and sales and
other parts of the business. So we ask people about the percentage of their spend that was
going into customer-facing systems. You can see that, you know, in this case, more than
25% of the spend, you know, in this survey, was going to double in the course of two years.
Double. And so, you know, that's just an indication of how dramatic this shift is going to be.
What it means is that, for the long term, all of the work that we do to create software
is going to become reoriented, or a lot of the work that we do is going to be come reoriented
to this new world of customer-facing systems. And the rapid cycles that we have, rapid cycles,
the very fuzzy requirements, the fickle tastes of customers, it's going to be -- it's just
a wild and wooly world that we have to reorient ourselves to keep up with.
[00:10:32] It's going to be fun. (laughter) Even if it is challenging. So when I use the
term "customer-facing systems," I find that it's important to be precise about what it
is we're referring to, what it is I'm referring to, because a lot of companies have invested
lots and lots of their resources into call centers, you know, contact centers, branch
banking applications, retail, in-store kind of systems. We think of these as front-office
applications. And what they generally do is enable one of your employees, or perhaps an
agent of yours, to interact with a customer. And, you know, they're obviously very important.
Customer-facing applications are different. Customer-facing applications are applications
that the customers actually use. And that's where the action is. There's certainly some
new ideas and innovations that are going into front office, but where the real action is
is in the apps that we're providing to customers to use on smartphones and tablets. And, you
know, there's a range of other kinds that we -- you know, we tend to pay a lot of attention
to smartphones, but there's a range of other uses here that are coming into play really,
really quickly. Just think about the number of products that you use, physical products
that you use, that now [00:12:05] incorporate software and a connection to the internet.
I saw one recently. I was at a conference recently, and it's a true story, Phillips
has an internet-connected, electronic toothbrush. And you may laugh at that, and it may seem
silly, but the facts of our individual brushing habits are actually very important to our
dentists. And so, you know, by connecting to the internet, it's possible for us to actually
share that information with our dentists, and help to improve our dental care. So just,
there's a range of new uses that are coming on stream, as I say, really, really quickly,
and the customer facing application part of this movement is really where we've got to
focus our attention if we're going to get through this change.
So what do we do? We've got a whole new set of requirements. We've got a big raft of new
spending that, personally, I think our companies need us to help guide. You know, it can't
be -- this spending cannot be effective without us, and without what we know about designing
software and delivering software. We have to learn some new tricks, certainly, but I
think it's our [00:13:29] obligation to really play a key role here. But we've got to make
some changes. And I think we've got to make three changes, what we see all the time.
So I'll hit the second two first, because I'm just going to highlight those, because
we want to focus on quick tools and platforms in this particular discussion. Change the
way you work. This gets to your methods, the methods that you use to create software. It
gets to your relationships with your colleagues in the business, particularly marketing and
sales, the real customer-facing parts of, you know, your organization. Becoming the
business is essentially the idea that you will constitute an R&D function. A lot of
IT and app dev organizations really don't have an R&D function anymore. They are order-takers.
They respond to requests, and they produce the best result, you know, best effort that
they can to satisfy that request for software. But actually, we keep hearing from leaders
in marketing and sales that they really want us as app dev pros and IT pros, to help them
think through ideas about how to use technology more effectively, how to use it more efficiently,
about how to understand new technology and, you [00:14:55] know, new opportunities that
arrive. And for that, you really need an R&D function.
Now, this is a big organizational change, you know, for most organizations. But it's
something that we really need to very seriously get into if we're going to be successful here.
This is the change the way you work and become the business or longer conversations, I'd
be happy to follow up with anyone on a call, you know, after the call on those two things.
But what we're here today to talk about is we've also got to change the platforms that
we use to deliver software. And that's what I want to hit on next. And I call this generation,
or this category of platforms and tools "quick," because they are really -- what we're going
to be talking about are really optimized for fast delivery. There are lots of other -- there
are other platforms that have other -- that are optimized for other values, like integrity,
for example. You know, extreme integrity. But here, we're really optimized to deliver
fast, and deliver frequently.
[00:16:00] So first, we got to recognize that some of the old techniques that we've used
for many, many years, particularly coding, are just not going to cut it here. Now, coding
never goes away. I don't want to mislead, I don't want you to be misled that I'm arguing
against coding. There's always a need to do some coding somewhere; integration, or a special
algorithm, or something like that. But we need to shift away from doing so much of software
development in coding if we're going to hope to keep up with this new set of demands. So
the way a lot of people go at this is they start at, they do a lot of coding today, and
they start by trying to optimize that coding. They bring in application lifecycle management
tools, or they bring in, you know, requirement tools, or they bring in new methods, agile
methods. This is all fine, but you're basically just optimizing a set of techniques that has
in here limitations of speed. So what you really need to think about is bringing in
new tooling that helps you deal with the speed, and use coding more sparingly. Use coding
where it's absolutely required, because you know it's going to slow you down, and you
know it's going to slow down the ongoing change. So the new platforms, these quick platforms,
I call new [00:17:25] productivity platforms. They're aimed at productivity. They're really
aimed at changing the way we work, changing the way we create software, rather than trying
to optimize the existing coding methods that we've used for many, many years.
So the new productivity platforms have these six characteristics. They all share these
characteristics. As I said, they're optimized, they're really designed to deliver software
far faster than you can with coding and IDEs. They are optimized for rapid change for delivering
changes to software very, very rapidly, and very reliably. Deploying apps very, very quickly.
So deployment is the phase after you get through your testing, and you're ready to go, and
your build, and you're ready to actually deploy the application. Oftentimes, as you know,
those deployment steps can take an awful long time, and they can introduce errors and delays
into the actual, you know, standing up of the production application. So these platforms
are designed to really cut that phase way, way down.
[00:18:42] One of the things that these platforms share in common is that they make it possible
for business experts to get deeply involved in the creation and delivery of software.
In some cases, they actually allow business experts to actually create software that gets
delivered, either in whole or in part. Usually, there's a professional developer in there.
You know, oftentimes, the professional developers are really, really responsible for delivering
the software. But there's a totally different relationship between the technical pros and
the business experts that's made possible by these environment. They're based on standards.
They're based on internet standards, they're based on platform standards like Java and
.NET. This is very, very different from the past where we found people looking for advances
in productivity in proprietary languages. You know, back in the day, we used to call
those fourth generation languages, or 4GLs. This is different. These environments really
don't try to introduce a lot of proprietary technology. They try to optimize existing
standards, you know, create platforms that are based on existing standards.
[00:19:55] And then lastly, these platforms are seeking to support the needs that we have
today for deployment. So cloud is almost always in the picture. You can deploy to a public
cloud if you like. You can deploy on premise. And all of them are stepping up to the challenge
of mobile, because mobile apps are hot, they're really important to customer-facing programs,
and they're hard. They're really difficult to right into build.
Now, I mentioned cloud. And one of the -- when I first started doing this research on new
productivity platforms about three years ago, cloud was in the picture, but it wasn't a
real strong part of everybody's offering. Well, now it is. And I think that's the result
of a couple of things. But, you know, a couple of things. You know, one is that cloud itself
has become much, much more interesting to a lot of enterprise, and there's a lot of
movement into the cloud. But also, if you combine the high productivity development
techniques that the new productivity platforms provide, plus, you know, the easy alignment
with business experts, with cloud, you really get the best of both worlds. Cloud is a great
mechanism for addressing [00:21:14] that deployment problem we talked about earlier. And so for
that reason, at this point, everybody that I was studying a couple years ago that, you
know, some of them had cloud and some of them don't, they all have cloud offerings now.
And the result is to kind of amp up the productivity that they've got.
Also, on this slide, you'll notice some of the vendors that I put in this category. So
obviously, progress is here today, and because they're in this game. But then you see some
other names on here as well. Salesforce is probably the one that everybody recognizes,
because they're a very big company and have a lot of presence. You can see some of the
others. There are actually dozens of companies, little companies that are minding this space
now. It's -- because it's a very big problem, this issue that we're facing is a huge issue.
So a lot of people trying to get involved here, and help out.
Now, I mentioned "quick." I've used the word "quick," I've talked about new productivity,
I've talked about fast delivery. Let's be specific about what that means, what we need
to understand there. And fast initial delivery of a new software [00:22:25] project is, of
course, important. We want to get to market very, very quickly with the initial release.
Usually, we've got our colleagues in marketing and sales breathing down our necks, you know,
and the time crunch is on. We've got to get the holiday, we've got to get the new release
out for the holidays. Or, you know, whatever happens to be. So that's really important.
But then another, I think, just as important, is we've got to be able to update that initial
release very frequently, and very reliably. And so it's not only getting that first release
out there and then maybe come back at it a year later. Oftentimes, you're coming back
to it right away, because there's new -- there's something you've learned from your initial
experience with that app that you want to address. Or there's a new module that you
want to get out there. Or you just -- the change in campaigns. There's a change in campaigns
that's coming up. You know, or yadda yadda. There's just lots and lots of reasons that
organizations drive change into these customer-facing applications.
So you can see that there's those two aspects that are very, [00:23:41] very important to
consider as you look at your options here. And you can see that the state of practice
is actually challenging at the moment. Fast delivery, number one in our surveys, and number
one, you know, problem with that is new and changing requirements, or unclear require
-- and then number two is unclear requirements. You can see that -- you know, that's been
an age-old problem, but it really hurts us here. So this is why the ability to align
very, very easily and quickly with the business experts is so important, because we really,
with these platforms, have new ways of dealing with this age-old requirement problem that
just kills us. We can actually sit with them with working software, and they can see it
right away, you know, what we're doing right away, and make course corrections to the design,
or basically make priority judgments, you know, right there on the spot.
In terms of prompt updates designed in, very, very few organizations are capable of making
updates on the schedules that are needed. You can see only a quarter in a recent research
survey that we did could make changes weekly or faster. Weekly or faster is kind of just
OK for a lot of marketing [00:25:07] needs. Some of them need to make changes, many, many
changes within a week, sometimes within a day. So we've got to obviously do something
there. We've got to obviously really change our game there if we're going to keep up.
Now, I've been talking primarily about Enterprise app dev shops so far. But there's a real -- the
independent software vendor community faces the same pressures. And particularly with
the delivery of frequent updates, and the delivery of cloud-based solutions. I'm just
going to build this slide out. You know, for most ISVs, you know, when they compete for
business, they have to meet these four -- they have to cross these four hurtles, got to be
strong financially, you got to have a, you know, good, sustainable architecture. You
know, customers look for a good set of partners in your ecosystem to help with implementation,
and to supplement your offering. And they always, of course, look for good security,
particularly when you're offering them a cloud-based solution. So these requirements will continue
on. But you now have to deal with customization -- you know, which has always been a factor.
But [00:26:32] you got to deal with that now on much, much faster timelines. Plus, you
got to be able to implement continual improvement. You know, these rapid updates. And so this
is a list of the requirements, the areas that we've observed in our research, where ISVs
need to provide flexibility to their customers, the ability for customers to make changes,
and make revisions to their SaaS offering. And you can see, the list is extensive here.
And in some cases, it's deep, where people want to actually go in and extend your schema.
So what this means for ISVs is that, you know, who are also looking at platforms, is that,
you know, your criteria in choosing a cloud platform, you know, you want to look at a
supplier, you want to look at a platform that certainly helps you satisfy the basic valuation
criteria. But also, a platform that helps you meet those, what I call, responsiveness
criteria. All of that rapid customization, rapid change, sustaining customization through
changes to your underlying software, as you release new versions and, you know, new product
releases, is all really crucial now in this new world of customer-facing applications.
So for ISVs and for Enterprise development shops [00:28:26] alike, the criteria, really,
for evaluating these new platforms is really different from the kinds of criteria you may
have used in the past. And again, it's all about helping us respond to this very different
set of time constraints, and time requirements, and respond to the need for very rapid change
to respond to opportunities and threats in their customer operations.
So I hope I've set the stage and helped give you a context for Blake's presentation. Here
is my contact information. And if you would like to follow up at all, just please send
me mail. If you like, care to follow me on Twitter, I talk a lot about my research on
Twitter. And hopefully, I can provide you with some help. So with that I'll thank you,
and Blake, turn it over to you.
Blake Connell: All right, terrific, John. Really appreciate
it, great insight. And I would say that, you know, here at Progress -- I'm going to run
through a few slides and then show you how we're addressing [00:29:22] some of the issues
that we're uncovering in this webinar. But I'd say we're highly aligned with the viewpoint,
you know, that John was just talking about.
So with that, let's just do a quick kind of recap of, you know, again, our position on
things. And again, the things that are driving this need to look at, you know, alternative
platforms for creating. You know, or what I like to say assembling applications in a
really rapid fashion. You know, and again, just, these are things that I suspect people
have heard. And just to reiterate, you know, what the context behind this changing landscape,
you know, business folks and people who are trying to really add value to the organizations,
are interested in these key capabilities. Things like agility. So, you know, the ability
to drive business outcomes, either increase revenue, you know, reduce cost. Obviously,
speed has become a dramatic factor. John touched on that quite a bit. You know, being able
to respond to, you know, the ever-changing landscape in the marketplace. Flexibility
certainly is huge, and we haven't uncovered too many customers today that have, you know,
a sky-is-the-limit budget to address all of these issues, right? So [00:30:36] it's really
sort of the opposite of that, having to do more with less. So they need a platform that's
really flexible so that they can, you know, address their issues rapidly, but with a reasonable
cost expenditure.
And, you know, power, the ability to really get maximum value for all the data that they
have in their organization. So these are sort of the demands that are being placed on the
business. And I think tie in really well to what John was talking about.
So, you know, what are some of the issues that, you know, we can't just use what we
have today to address this? Well, one of the big issues we see is the communication gap
between IT and the business folks who need to actually deliver, you know, these business
outcomes, like increasing revenue or reducing cost. You know, the ability to, or the need
to provide applications at the speed of business is sort of a challenge in today's world, and
the complexity of integrating all these data resources that people have.
[00:31:41] So I'm going to talk about each one of these briefly in the next few slides.
Let's talk about this important one, which is this language barrier issue. And this is
really sort of a language barrier between IT and the users. And of course, users are
very demanding. They want new applications, they want them now. And IT, of course, has
a significant backlog of applications, typically, that they're under the gun to produce. So
there's sort of already a disconnect between the two. Users want to be able to customize
applications, you know, quickly and easily by themselves. IT tends to have maybe a longer
term view and is creating applications that are more broadly applicable. So sometimes
that's at the expense of customization. Users want to be able to, you know, access these
applications from anywhere, any device. You know, sort of a cloud model. You know, oftentimes,
there's some restrictions on the IT side about how they're going to best provide that kind
of access, in particular around data and where data can travel. And basically, you know,
users want applications that are sort of built to their requirements, and it's difficult
for IT, frankly, to deliver on those. So this is one of the challenges in the world today
in terms of why their systems are effective.
[00:33:00] Another issue that we see is, you know, when you talk about a new application
project to meet some business need, it often starts with the need to stand up specific
infrastructure to support that new application design. So what we see here on this screen
is sort of this notion of, you know, just a few years ago, how this sort of would transpire.
We have a need for a new application, we talk to our IT group, we, you know, then learn
that we need to, you know, go out and provision and procure a new system. Maybe we work with,
you know, our provider, maybe that's Dell, we got to bring the system in. We need to
stand up other hardware resources around that, perhaps. We need to install operating systems.
We need to make sure everything's patched correctly. You know, once the application
server that we might be using to put on this. Even if it's, you know, an open source technology
like Apache Tomcat, we have to download that, install it, make sure everything's working
well. So there's this sort of, just, upfront, initial cost in terms of just procuring the
system. And there's some additional costs that I'll talk about in just a second. But,
you know, we've [00:34:10] sort of moved on from that with virtualization to be able to
clone that sort of configuration issue, and be able to sort of very rapidly, at least,
stamp out configurations in virtualized environments. So that's actually helped quite a bit, sort
of reduce the timeframe to get going on new projects.
But really, what we're talking about here with platform as a service -- and in our case,
you know, a highly productive platform as a service -- is getting away from that altogether
form the user's perspective, and really delivering a platform that, frankly, enables sort of
a self-service style of being able to create useful, important applications to the business
that are highly customized and in tune with what the business wants. While at the same
time, IT is able to, you know, retain this control in terms of managing the underlying
infrastructure. They're still going to be procuring systems, or deploying into a cloud
and managing that relationships. They still might be using virtualization technology.
But all that stuff is sort of not exposed upfront, really, to the users who are essentially
using this as a service. You know, a shared service to create rapidly applications, and
to deploy them very rapidly.
[00:35:21] And there's a whole bunch of other, sort of, issues around this sort of shift
into platform as a service. Beyond just the initial procurement, there's, you know, the
administration savings, perhaps, over time. There might be energy savings, depending on
where this infrastructure is located, and a variety of things. But we're seeing this
rapid shift to being able to, again, get your applications going, you know, literally in
days, versus, again, starting from the standpoint of, "OK, we need to go find the resources
to deploy to."
And then finally, the other sort of challenge we have is, you know, the complex data integration
requirements. And you'll see that, you know, that's one of the core strengths of Progress
in general, and in particular, with Progress Pacific, is the ability to integrate with
just about any data source you have very easily. So bringing data into your applications is
critical. Applications are nothing without the data. And so the ability to very easily
connect the data, you know, create [00:36:24] data-driven applications, and integrate with
data is hugely important. And we'll be showing that here in just a second when I kind of
walk through things.
So these are challenges that people have, using sort of existing infrastructure and
existing process. The results tend to be, you know, this notion of shadow IT, you know,
that we found a data point that observe, you know, roughly 30% of workloads are actually
conducted on shadow IT. And this is this notion that, you know, it's difficult to get things
done through proper channels, so people tend to get creative and bring in their own systems,
their own software, and create applications that are useful to the organization. And of
course, as you would imagine, that's fraught with a lot of peril from the perspective of
maybe these applications aren't built all that well, maybe not be compliant with corporate
guidelines. You know, it's unlikely that they're scalable. So if they do reach some critical
mass of usefulness, it's very difficult to scale them. There's probably not performance
associated with them. And then there's also some security issues around who's seen the
data, and access to data, etc.
[00:37:36] So it's a real problem. And sometimes, people are a little skeptical of this. But,
you know, my own personal example of this, you know, in an organization prior to coming
to Progress, we literally had a system that was under someone's desk that was very important
to us in the marketing department. And I distinctly remember being with that person, away from
the office. We were traveling. And we was madly calling back to the office to find someone
to go into his office and literally manually reboot the system because it was offline.
So it's those kinds of sort of efforts that are, you know, really not ideal. So of course,
from our perspective, the way we address this and really solve this, we believe, is through
Progress Pacific. So this is a platform as a service that enables this rapid creation
of applications, the ability to very easily integrate with all of your important data.
So creating these data-driven applications. And then the third pillar, which I think is
very compelling, is the ability to have this service either hosted by us, hosted at another
service provider of your choosing, or even running this on premise. So it's this [00:38:48]
flexibility of being able to deploy where you want to deploy to.
So with that, what I'm going to do, is I'm going to actually jump into a demonstration
of Progress Pacific right now, and then we'll come back and finish up with some questions
and answers. So let me jump in here. I'm going to launch our screen share. And bear with
me for one second. OK. So hopefully, everyone can see onscreen the Progress Pacific console.
So I'm going to show you sort of what this new paradigm looks like that John has been
talking about, and this ability to, again, enable people who are non-developers, like
myself, to create rather compelling applications. So this is -- again, it's a web browser, it's
a single -- you know, you log in. In the case of Progress Pacific, you go to Progress.com/Pacific,
you log in with your Pacific ID and password, and you get to this console, where you can
select various components that make up Progress Pacific.
And the first thing I want to sort of show you is something called Data Direct Cloud.
And this is our ability to very [00:40:11] rapidly create connections to, you know, all
of your important data sources. So this is, I think, one of the pillars of creating impelling
new applications, is to get in the right data to those applications. So this is the Data
Direct Cloud dashboard screen. And I'll click on Data Sources. And you can see here all
the various data sources that we can very easily connect to. Things like Microsoft Dynamics,
our own role-based database. Salesforce, certainly. And you can see a host of others that are
in beta now, and some that are coming soon. So I've established a connection to Salesforce,
because what I'm going to do is create a quick support management, case management application
that will bring in contact information from Salesforce. So Data Direct Cloud is, you know,
connecting to Salesforce was a very simple click on the box. And literally, type in a
name for the data source, and my user ID and password, for, in this case, Salesforce.com.
And I was up and running.
So if I head back to the Pacific console, I'm going to now move into another section
of Pacific, which is the ability to [00:41:21] assemble these applications. And this is a
technology, and a component called Rollbase. So again, this is going to be a way of creating
applications without coding, and it's a browser-based method of creating applications. I can start
by creating a new application up here in the left-hand corner. But before I do that, you
know, one way to get started with applications is literally to use the sort of built-in application
directory. And there's a whole slew of different applications, pre-built applications that
you can start with, as you can see, that you can just simply select, you can review what
these things are, you can test-drive the application, get started that way. But I'm going to go
ahead and select "New application." And when I do that, there's -- even within the new
application process, there's several ways to get started. You can see if I look down
here, one way to get started is to import an application that you might have already
created on the [Force.com?] platform. So Force.com, you know, people have perhaps created the
applications there. One of the challenges with Force is you can only run those applications
on their network, their platform. And people want flexibility, they want to be able to
choose where they can deploy their application, [00:42:36] again, either on premise, or off
premise, with their preferred service provider partner. So this is one way to get started.
Or it might even have, you know, a Microsoft Access database application, and I can start
there.
But I'm going to start with a new application from scratch. I just hit "Create." And again,
we're going to just sort of call this "Support management application." I could type in a
description, hit "Save," and we're off and running. So I've started my applications,
called "Support manager." In order to make the application more useful, obviously, we
add different elements to it. And those elements, we call "objects," in the case of Pacific.
And so I can click on the Plus button, and I can create new objects inside of my application.
So this is a support management application. We want to, you know, perhaps review cases
that have come in. So these would be, you know, customers call in with a support case.
So let's create an object called "Case." So we select a new object called "Cases." And
now we've got our application called "Support manager," and we have some new cases, objects
that we can start working with. [00:43:52] In order to make this even more useful, I'm
going to edit the case page and add some new fields. And again, it's all drag and drop,
click-based development, if you will. Or really, what I call assembly. Since this is a case
management tool, I might want to have, you know, a timestamp of when the case was created,
so I can just simply drag and drop this useful component called "Created ad," which is a
date and time component. I can change this from a single column to a two-column page.
I can create very easily new fields by simply dragging and dropping. WE have a date and
time field for the creation of the case. Maybe we'll create a new one here called "Closed"
whenever we close a case. So we can, you know, do that very easily. And now we have new couple
fields here. Created, closed. We can add even more fields, things like pick lists. So someone
calls in with a case, maybe it's a case on -- what kind of case are they calling in on?
Is it a new feature? Enhancement? You know, is it a support issue? What have you. You
can create various items here very easily. Save. Associate with the case management object.
[00:45:20] So now we have, you know, a creation time, and a close time. You know, the kind
of priority for the case. We can continue to add new fields as we see fit. Obviously,
we can have maybe even another pick list called "priority." So if we want to have a priority
on here. And again, the code is being generated behind the scenes here, very -- you know,
I'm not typing in any language-specific information. We can create new sections very easily. You
know, rename section. We can call this maybe detail. So if we want to add more detail or
the case that comes in. And I'll add one more field here, just to round things off. We'll
call this, you know, a text area field where people can put more information on the case.
So with that, I can very easily save the changes I made here to this object called "Case."
And now you can see on-screen, in my support manager application, I've now got the ability
to create cases, I can change the type, I can change the priority. But we'll go in here
and edit a case. Or let's just create a new case. We'll select a "new case" button. You
know, it's a new feature, or enhancement. It's a priority two, new feature. [00:46:46]
Save. And we can create new cases that way.
So very easy, drag and drop assembly of applications. What we saw before with Data Direct Cloud
was the ability to connect to Salesforce. One thing that might be really useful in this
example is to associate the cases with particular customers that we have, right? So this is
this ability to use the important data that an organization has and make use of it. So
I can very easily create a new object, but this time a new object from external data.
And I'm going to choose to use data from Data Direct Cloud. And I'll type in my login here.
And we'll see (inaudible). Oh, I did. So we've now got a new object that's now associated
with that connection we made to Salesforce data. And these are all the tables in that
Salesforce database table, if you will. So I'm going to select "Contacts" from Salesforce,
because we want to add contacts. We'll call this "contact." And we'll create the object.
And now, what it does, it brings in the fields from that contact table within Salesforce.
So this is actually, you know, Salesforce data coming from my Salesforce implementation,
and I can create, you know, things like -- I want to look at the email, maybe -- you know,
things [00:48:41] like last name, first name. So I'm taking, you know, information from
my tables within Salesforce and moving them into this object. And of course, I can rearrange
things here if I want to look at things through first name, last name.
And we'll go ahead and create the field. On screen here, what you see is Data Direct Cloud
converts all that to a SQL query. So all that's generated for me automatically. I don't have
to figure that out myself. I just hit "save." And now we have the ability to, if we go back
to our application called "Support manager," we'll see that we have cases. And now we have
contacts. So when we go to the "Contacts" tab, it will load up information from my Salesforce
data, and associated in here. And I can change the views of this. Right now, the contact
information isn't very compelling. I can show first name, last name. Whatever fields are
available to me, I can very easily connect those things.
But there's one final step, in sort of the interest of time, here. I'll go into this
object definition table. And I want to [00:49:57] create a relationship. So a new relationship
between that contacts tab, and contacts object that we just created, and the cases object.
And so I can just select the case object, next, hit "Save," and what we'll be able to
do in our application, back in support manager, is when I create a new case, you'll see I
now have the magnifying glass, which allows me to look up contacts within my Salesforce
implementation. So as I'm creating new cases with, you know, priority one, and what type
of case it is, I can then look up the contact information, and populate it inside my application.
So again, the idea here, very easy, rapid assembly of applications. But pretty sophisticated,
powerful applications, right? It's not something that's trivial. I've actually connected to
Salesforce, I've actually created, in this case, support management application. Again,
all in this browser base, console-driven environment.
And one other point, just before we go back and take some Q&A. At any point, if I get
into trouble, integrated into Progress Pacific is our revamped community site. And you can
click on, [00:51:14] from any one of the components in Pacific, and it brings you to the community
site where you can look for information, get help. Perhaps you have an enhancement request
you would like to make for Progress, you could put it here. And again, this sort of speaks
to the new paradigm of creating applications. You know, it's clicks, not code. It's, you
know, rapid assembly. It's getting the right data into it very easily. And then there's
this community element to it as well, which is being able to get access to, you know,
the right information that you need at any time. And then one other just point on this,
I've been just using, you know, clicking around in drop down menus. But certainly, if you
want to break out of that mode, you know, we support, in this case, Progress Pacific
JavaScript. So the ability to customize with JavaScript today. And then going forward,
we have, you know, a very rich legacy at Progress with application development environments.
And in particular, with our OpenEdge technology, and ABL, advanced business language. And we'll
be incorporating that as well into Progress Pacific. So the ability to sort of marry the
two together. So, you know, you can get deeper into this on the [00:52:30] coding side if
you'd like, or you could stay on the more -- you know, again, starting with the templates,
and just customizing around the edges through the widgets and menus.
So that's just a quick run through of our Progress Pacific. And with that, what I wanted
to do is I'm going to come back here and let's sort of get to our conclusion here, and leave
some time for questions and answers. About five minutes to the top of the hour, so what
I'd like to do now, John, is maybe take questions that have been stacking up in our Q&A area.
John Rymer: Great.
Chris Flack: Yeah, they have been stacking up in the Q&A
area. Just a quick reminder, guys, for the audience. If you have a question, please feel
free to ask your question in the "Ask a question" box on the left-hand side of your console.
And we do have a couple minutes left, so try to squeeze as many of your questions in as
you can.
Blake Connell: [00:53:34] All right. Well, I'm going to go
ahead and take one of the questions here. In fact, I think I just answered it. But the
question is, you know, times, templates, forms can seem sort of -- that kind of development
can seem restrictive. You know, part of their languages are supported in Pacific. And again,
it's JavaScript. We have an ability to use standard, straight-up JavaScript to enhance
the application, and you can also integrate with your, you know, ABL, or your advanced
business language, open (inaudible) applications as well. You can do that today, if you run
Progress Pacific on premise, so you can actually integrate those two together. Beyond that,
you can also take advantage certainly of the server-side coding as well. So, you know,
if you're doing some coding in JSPs and other items on the server side, those certainly
can be incorporated into a Progress Pacific sort of front end, if you will.
Chris Flack: [00:54:30] So we had a question here, guys,
from the audience. I'll ask it because Michael just put this question in there, so I'll put
it out there to both you guys. There was a question from Michael [Bosner?], he's an audience
member, and he's asking, "Is data security a major data integration requirement concern?"
John Rymer: Definitely. Definitely. In this -- there's
nothing magic here. In the scenario that Blake was describing, you know, for example, where
he went out to Salesforce.com and grabbed some data, this is sort of -- there's a lot
of that kind of integration that is now going on, because so many organizations are adopting
SaaS. And absolutely, security is a major concern. Fortunately, there are a lot of solutions,
a lot of good solutions out there. The SaaS providers themselves, the cloud providers
themselves, are actually stepping up, and have been for some time, in providing quite
good security and good security controls. Plus, the platforms, such as Pacific, also
provide good security controls. Of course, you know, your mileage may vary, you know,
depending on what your requirements [00:55:48] are. But the thing to look for is the controls,
is, you know, that will allow you to assure yourself that you're meeting your requirements
for security and privacy.
Blake Connell: Right, and I'll make one other just quick
comment there on the Salesforce example that I just used. It truly is essentially just
logging into Salesforce through Data Direct Cloud with my Salesforce ID and password.
In addition to that, the Salesforce, you know, does provide an additional security key that
I needed to prepend -- or excuse me, append, actually -- my password with. It's a little
clunky to show, that's why I didn't set it up prior. So there's a little additional security
there on that front as well. It wasn't just simply, you know, an ID and password. It's
an ID and password, and a security key that you get separately from Salesforce as part
of being a Salesforce customer. So that's just one example there. Yeah. Security on
the data side is certainly paramount.
Chris Flack: [00:56:48] Excellent. We've got a question
here. This comes from Ashley Wright. She's an audience member, and she's asking a question,
"So Blake," she's curious, "how do you publish the app to be used by the customer?"
Blake Connell: Yeah. So the app is -- you know, that's the
nice thing about a [pas?] application. It's the development environment is the deployment
environment. So you don't have this mismatch, or this more traditional waterfall sort of
flow of traditional app development, where you're creating applications separately in
an IDE, and then they go into, you know, a preproduction test, Q&A environment that in
some cases -- or in many cases -- is often misaligned with the actual production environment.
You know, and so there's some hiccups there in sort of moving the app down the assembly
line, if you will, in the factory. This is, you know, you literally develop, and you push
it out, and it's a URL, in this case, you know, people can get to their apps through
a web browser. So this is the thing that people really like about it from the business user's
perspective, is it's an easy paradigm to create applications, and it's an easy paradigm [00:57:54]
to, you know, deploy, if you will, applications as well. And then on the IT front, of course,
built into -- that's the whole, sort of, part -- that's the magic underneath the hood, if
you will, of a platform as a service, which is governance and, you know, the ability to
scale this out. So as you push this out very easily, people access it, these applications,
you know, they become -- you know, the sort of go buy role if you will within your organization,
you can very easily scale the underlying infrastructure to map to that demand. So all those things
happen, you know, very easily.
Chris Flack: Excellent. You know what? We'll try to squeeze
in one last question before we get to the top of the hour of our webcast today. So if
in the audience, if you didn't get your question answered, I will personally supply your questions
to the people at point. And John, if your question is for John, I will supply your question
to them. But really quickly, Blake, somebody here in the audience had a question: "Can
Pacific be used by anyone to build an application?"
Blake Connell: [00:58:51] You know, I mean, I was able to
create an application just there. And frankly, I would consider myself sort of (overlapping
dialogue; inaudible). It really can be -- again, if you start from those templates -- and there
are a raft of them in there -- you know, we kind of went the -- I would even a little
bit more difficult route in terms of just starting from, you know, a scratch application,
drag and drop, you can even go higher level than that and start with templates, and create
these applications. So, you know, it's, I guess, to steal a line from John, you know,
your mileage may vary in terms of skill sets to do this. You know, there is a little bit
of, just sort of getting some of those basic concepts, like, you know, there's widgets,
and objects, and sort of assigning properties to objects, if you will. But, you know, for
people who are -- you know, we can get into a whole other discussion about, you know,
citizen developers. But for people who have been writing applications using Excel, and
Access, and those kinds of things, this'll be much -- you know, very -- a very comforting
way of [00:59:58] creating applications. And perhaps might even be, you know, easier to
create sophisticated applications.
Chris Flack: Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Blake,
for your time today. And thank you John, for your time as well. You guys gave an excellent
presentation. So I'm sure the audience had a really great time. And as I did as well
listening in. So thank you so much for giving your time today. The three of us would like
to send a big thank you to everyone in our audience for joining us for today's webcast,
"How to stay ahead of trends in application development," sponsored by [Av Point?]. This
has been brought to you by Application Development Trends, and ADTmag.com. Thank you all for
joining, and have a great day, everybody. We'll talk soon. Have a happy holidays.