This is the foundation of a major PaaS transformation Progress has been working on over the last year to address customer and partner demand in one of the fastest growing IT markets.

So, what is Progress Pacific?

Progress Pacific is a fundamental new approach that gives you the freedom to choose the data sources, deployment environment and business logic that best fit your needs. Karen Tegan Padir, senior vice president and business line executive, Application Development for Progress Software explains more below.

In a nutshell, we’re taking Rollbase and our products, including Progress DataDirect, OpenEdge^® and Corticon^®, and uniting them into one cloud-based platform. Now every aspect of developing an application – from design, setting up services, to connecting to data sources – will be part of one unified experience that conceals the complexity underneath.

Here are just a few of the capabilities that will be included:

• Rapid Development: With Rollbase, powerful, standards-based business applications can go from idea to reality faster with innovative point-and-click, drag-and-drop tools in a standard browser, saving time and money while also providing deployment freedom.

• Connection to the Most Data Sources:  A comprehensive set of SaaS, relational database, NoSQL, Big Data, social, CRM and ERP sources can be tapped into for automated, context-aware applications. Technology from Progress DataDirect^®, helps to unlock an application’s full value by allowing faster integration, analysis and decision-making. 

• Unique Hybrid Deployment Options: Progress Pacific offers developers the opportunity to create cloud apps that can be deployed in multiple environments (cloud, on-premise, hybrid) as well as connect to existing applications.

Sounds great! When can I get it? 

Progress Pacific will be generally available beginning in Summer 2013 with Rollbase™ available immediately – so stay tuned!

For more information:

Visit the Rollbase Blog

Follow the conversation on Twitter at #PRGSPacific and #PaaS

Follow Progress Software on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+

Follow Progress DataDirect on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+

Follow Rollbase on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn

Be sure to share your thoughts in the comments section!

“By artfully smashing ideas together—Luke Williams upends the ordinary, providing a motivational and pragmatic blueprint for innovative thinking.”

—Jamyn Edis, Vice-President of Emerging Technology R&D at HBO

We can’t wait to hear him live in October on our stage! Save your seat by registering now.

Did you know that?

• Every day 1 million people become smartphone users (Ericsson).
• Mobile application development projects targeting smartphones and tablets will outnumber native PC projects by a ratio of 4:1 by 2015 (Gartner).
• We’re in the middle of a mini tablet surge, with the market predicted to grow by at least 42 percent to more than 170 million units (IDC)

Well if these aren’t enough good reasons to go mobile, we have another — THE PROGRESS APP DEV CHALLENGE!

We’re pleased to announce the launch of this exciting new contest which will award five lucky winners over US $25,000 worth of prizes, for mobile apps built using the OpenEdge platform.

Anyone is able to participate, but you only have one mission — build the best mobile app.

Additional information on contest rules, terms & conditions and all the details can be found directly at the Progress App Dev Challenge Website. A few points we’d thought we’d mention — your submission can be either a new app or a mobile version of an existing app but must be developed using the OpenEdge Mobile App Builder. Deadline for entries is 31 July 2013, but you must pre-register to participate by 15 June. Winners will be announced at Progress Exchange 2013 in Boston on 8 October.  In fact, if you impress us enough, we may even showcase your app at Exchange.

What are you waiting for?  Send us your most creative, innovative app and show us and the world what you can do!

We are happy to be able to share additional information on Progress Exchange 2013 tracks and some of the exciting things we have planned for October. With three full days of valuable content and more than 70 hours of breakout sessions across eight tracks, the event will be packed full of networking opportunities and sessions including:

1. Mobile and Web: Developing applications for any and all devices
2. Business Application Development:  Simplifying development with Progress OpenEdge
3. Developer Productivity: Using the latest tools and frameworks to modernize and speed development
4. Business Productivity: Empowering business analysts and business users
5. Data Management: Maximizing performance, scalability and reliability
6. Cloud and aPaaS: Building applications of the future now—fast
7. Data-Driven Applications: Accessing the world’s data—easily—with Progress DataDirect
8. Partner Growth Strategies:  Monetizing and marketing your applications

Conference attendees will also have the opportunity to take a deeper dive and explore the latest Progress technologies in these instructor-led, hands-on workshops— at no additional cost.

If you want to learn more please register now and take advantage of the savings. We hope to see you in October!

Pre-registration is available now – save $700 if you register by 10 May and don’t forget our Call for Stories is also open until 10 May. Submit your idea for a session today!

Call for Stories

Do you have a compelling story about how your business uses Progress technology? Would you like to present that story to peers at a session at Progress Exchange in Boston?

Our call for stories is now open! We are looking for presentations describing how you have had success in any one of these areas:

• Mobile & Web UI
• Developer Productivity, Tools & Frameworks
• Business Productivity—OpenEdge BPM, Corticon or Sonic
• Database Management & IT Operations
• The Cloud & Next Generation Applications
• DataDirect

We are looking for stories that illustrate our theme of “Discover. Develop. Deliver.” Tips on how Progress technology helps you discover innovative solutions. Case studies that demonstrate how you develop with Progress technology to respond to a particular business challenge. Examples of how you are able to deliver a better product and improve productivity.

The deadline is May 10, 2013 so please submit before it’s too late.

Corticon Collaborator is a powerful business rules collaboration platform that provides user-based and role-based access controls and sharing capabilities of native Corticon Studio assets. This enables streamlined enterprise rules management for single or multiple teams; guaranteed security, version control and compliance and the ability to leverage common business rules and decisions across the organization.

The end result is increased flexibility, security and efficiency thanks to streamlined enterprise rules management.

To learn more about Corticon Collaborator and how it can improve your business rules environment, please visit http://www.progress.com/en/corticon/corticon-collaborator.html or contact your sales representative.

Discover with Progress

New technology. New ideas. New connections. A whole new experience.

Develop with Progress

Personalize. Collaborate. Innovate. Experience the fastest, most productive application development and deployment platform. Join the hands-on labs and demonstrations.

Deliver with Progress

Cloud. Big data. Social. Mobile. The freedom you crave and choice you need. See for yourself with real ROI examples from our community.

Experience Progress, a new Exchange, and a new world of data-centric application development.

Join us in Boston. October 6-9, 2013 at The Westin Boston Waterfront

Click to learn more.

DBS is a good example of how organizations in many industries – banking, telco and retail as examples, are moving from conventional customer relationships to those that are more personalized and interactive, to increase revenues and increase loyalty. And a key technology in enabling this is Complex Event Processing (CEP).

Consider the targeting of marketing promotions. Customer segmentation through profiling is the start of this process, although in itself it’s nothing new. Segmentation involves understanding customers’ past spending patterns, combining this with other financial information that may exist or can be implied, and further combining this with other socio-economic information. This is matched with marketing promotions which are then sent out to the customer in the hope of a positive response. And it is more hope than expectation. Even using sophisticated predictive analytics technology to determine what offer to send leads to very low response rates, usually less than 1%.

There are many reasons for this low response rate but one that can be tackled and that is key to DBS’ strategy is ensuring that the offers are contextually relevant. Gledhill gives an example of adding context to an offer by using the location information implied by the use of an ATM machine in a shopping centre. Perhaps the offer gives the recipient the chance of 20% off lunch in a nearby restaurant. If delivered very soon after the ATM transaction (within a few seconds) it will be known that the customer will be physically near the restaurant in question. The offer has far more contextual relevance to the customer to an offer conventionally delivered hours or days later when any context will have been lost.

The above example uses location to provide physical context. But there’s an even more important factor at work here – time (and for people moving in particular, time and location are, of course, inextricably linked). Responding at the right time is critical to providing context. Imagine another example, this time from the world of mobile telco. During a phone call the caller exceeds the number of free minutes within their price plan. At the moment the call is terminated they receive a text telling them this and also offering them an upgrade to a plan including more minutes. Intuitively one would expect a much higher response rate than if this offer was sent hours or days later. And practise bears this out. Turkcell, Turkey’s biggest mobile telco, and a Progress customer I’ve written about before, has found it typically receives 10 times the number of positive responses when such offers are sent in real-time than when sent hours or days afterwards.

Responding fast is critical in both these cases. Recently, I’ve started using the term intervention window to describe the time window that exists to effectively respond to a business event that occurs.  This is illustrated below:

Intervention window is a term borrowed from medicine where it describes the time available between a diagnosis and an effective medical intervention. It is intended to describe the maximum time that is available to respond effectively to some kind of business event, whether an ATM withdrawal, the termination of a phone call or something else.

This is where CEP comes in – monitoring business events of interest, looking for patterns which indicate the optimum time and context to send an offer has arrived and then dispatching the message to the customer within the relevant intervention window.

This type of real-time response to customer interactions is becoming more commonplace and, in a mobile world, something we’re coming to demand. Expect more of it.

During Dr. John Bates’ keynote on Wednesday, he discussed the ten imperatives forand what needs to go into a platform and model to effectively deliver those imperatives. He proposes a model that would wrap cloud services as modules that can be assembled and composed through any Platform as a Service. See more on Dr. Bates’ presentation in the video below.

With cloud application, Dr. Bates believes that almost everything you need to build an app already exists out there in the cloud. Only some assembly is required to make the perfect application. Another trend he sees in cloud that will become a focus for 2013 is the convergence between platforms. Mobile, social, big data, etc will all become part of the cloud and there will be less focus on Infrastructure as a Service, says Dr. Bates. Learn more about his cloud predictions for 2013 in the video below.

Lots to look forward to in 2013! If you haven’t already, be sure to check out our other Cloud Expo wrap up posts on the Data Connections blog and follow us on Twitter at @ProgressSW.