When B&L decided to offer a SaaS version of its ERP solution, the product was ready to deploy in only three months through the help of the Progress Empowerment Program. Since inception, B&L’s SaaS product has driven over 900% more new business for the company year over year.

Watch this short video to learn more about B&L’s transformation through Progress Software:

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!

Watch the short video below to learn more about how York uses OpenEdge to provide quick, reliable insurance services.

The video below explains how EVVO Labs uses Progress OpenEdge Application Development platform to provide a solid foundation for ISV customers to build software while focusing on customer and marketplace needs. Watch to learn more.

Watch the video below to learn how Bluebird Auto Rental Systems uses the Progress OpenEdge SaaS platform to create new business opportunities, including reducing telecommunications costs for SMBs.

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!

Here are 7 ways automating your decision-making with OpenEdge rules can benefit your organization:

1.    Managing complexity – Some decisions are really hard to make, and you must consider a multitude of related input parameters (for instance patient care – parameters could include only administering a drug for one gender, age group, or set of patients without particular medical history). Programming this by conventional means is daunting (and error prone). Business Rules Automation allows you to set up simple if-then scenarios.

2.    Managing ambiguity – Formulating decisions can quickly become a non-trivial effort. For a (seemingly) simple insurance risk rating decision, you consider age, hobbies, are they a smoker, etc., but are there “gaps” and inconsistencies in the way the decision will be executed? Catching these ambiguities early will save you enormously.

3.    Regulatory pressure – Businesses can quickly and securely accommodate changes to algorithms and logic associated with regulatory issues, for instance changes in taxation rates, testing periods for drug field-testing, or thresholds for banking transactions.

4.    Managing compliance – Casting business decisions into discrete services enables users to easily attach an auditing capability to the business logic (e.g. audit loan requests that are greater than $100K, orders with a total value less than $1,000, etc.)

5.    Managing agility – Operationally, things in your enterprise may go wrong and you will need to intervene (e.g. a distribution center is experiencing delays and you want to switch the flow of goods by rerouting through an alternative distribution center). Imagine externalizing that logic and putting it into the hands of an operations supervisor… automation helps keep your business agile.

6.    Making safe decisions – Having decision services as assets that can be tested in isolation and easily deployed into business processes makes for robust, secure business applications.

7.    Making fast decisions – Lift decisions from code into a visual environment, enabling LOB experts to quickly modify and evolve existing logic to cater for evolving needs. Contrast this to the “old way” of modifying, testing and debugging code…

Colleen Smith, our Vice President of SaaS and Cloud, will be speaking at AATC about how integrated cloud solutions can create new and better business opportunities.

The session, titled, “How Cloud Solutions Work Together in an Integrated Fashion,” will be moderated by Mark Levitt, Director, Business Cloud Strategies, Strategy Analytics, and panelists will include Colleen, as well as Gurvinder Ahluwalia, CTO, Cross-brand Cloud – West Region, IBM, Robert Hull, Founder, President, Adaptive Planning, and Ross Mason, CTO and Founder, MuleSoft.

This session will take place on May 8^th from 3:50pm – 4:30pm PDT at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco.

Interested in attending? Progress partners and customers can save $300 with the discount code AACSP when registering online. Note, this discount is valid off the individual SIIA non-member rate only and does not apply to current attendees.

We hope to see you there!

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.

The Mobile App Builder is a browser-based Visual Designer allowing easy drag-and-drop development of mobile UIs. The Mobile App Builder is a cloud-based service, supports collaboration across multiple stakeholders and is seamlessly integrated with the robust, tried and tested OpenEdge platform. Mobile apps can be HTML5 web apps or can be “hybrid” apps running on a specific targeted mobile architecture (iOS or Android), which can be distributed via an app store. Here’s a view from the Developer perspective:

With this base capability now in place, Progress OpenEdge Application Partners (aka ISVs) and Direct End Users can build out their existing solutions to encompass mobility.

Last week we were flattered to see Salesforce.com announce the addition of mobile capabilities to their platform, with Version 2.0 of their mobile SDK slated to ship in June 2013 (!). It doesn’t look like their SDK supports the notion of a Visual Mobile UI tool with a canvas and a rich set of jQuery Mobile controls like the OpenEdge Mobile App Builder, so Salesforce Developers are forced to code JavaScript to build mobile apps and handle events in the mobile client.

Without a visual UI builder, there’s no intuitive way to map data from UI elements to a structured (JSON) payload from transmission over the wire to server-side business logic. These are huge productivity benefits for developers who are looking for a platform providing a state-of-the-art visual Mobile App Builder coupled with strong end-to-end security model, a highly scalable back end and an integrated database “in-the-box.” That’s OpenEdge Mobile!