OpenEdge Perspective

Straight From the Source: How One of Our ISV Partners Uses SaaS to Improve Business

2012-01-20T11:55:15-05:00

Almost all businesses—large or small—have a need for a comprehensive human resources (HR) program to serve their most valued resources, employees. Leading integrated benefits, payroll and human resources solutions provider Unicorn HRO provides solutions to manage HR processes with greater speed, scope and depth.

In the ’80s, Unicorn’s on-premise solution addressed approximately half the target market needs, and they knew they wanted to offer more. Today, Unicorn leverages the Progress OpenEdge SaaS application development platform to help their customers, from mega-corporations like McDonalds to lesser-known SMBs (small-medium businesses), do business with greater efficiency.

I asked Tim Diassi, EVP and GM for Unicorn HRO to share the top reasons they use SaaS and this is what he told me:

Ability to deliver services via the Web -- Unicorn releases new software upgrades twice a year with updated federal, state and local tax rates. SaaS helps Unicorn keep everything up-to-date so that customers can quickly and easily take advantage of the newest software version to stay compliant.
Reduced time-to-market – The scalability and flexibility of a SaaS application development platform accelerates the speed with which Unicorn distributes software upgrades. In fact, Unicorn migrated 50 clients over a single weekend, without a hitch.
Business continuity and disaster processing – Just because your network goes down, doesn’t mean your business can stop running. Unicorn’s service teams have kept customers’ applications up and running during all kinds of crises, including Hurricane Katrina.
Increased ROI – Thanks to the cloud, Unicorn has experienced double-digit growth for the past 5 years without adding any significant cost of capital investment for the development of new services.

The Progress–Unicorn partnership shows the true power of SaaS. We’re excited to continue to work with such an innovative company as they plan further leverage SaaS for increased efficiency and business process integration.

Thanks and as always, please feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you think.

Greetings 2012 – Say Hello to OpenEdge 11

2012-01-04T09:41:18-05:00

As was mentioned in mid-December, the latest update to our OpenEdge platform is now shipping, and I am pleased to say that it is enabling hundreds of our customers and ISV partners to securely develop and deploy applications across any platform, any mobile device, and any Cloud.

One of the highlights of OpenEdge 11.0 is our patent-pending Multi-tenant Tables, in which data is physically (not virtually) separated in the database - providing greater security and control for Cloud deployments. Multi-tenancy is a critical component and key differentiator for our customers and partners, along with our multi-Cloud deployment options, business process-enabled development, and support for mobile devices.

Feedback has been very positive and many customers are migrating to OpenEdge 11.0 sooner than expected to take advantage of the increased security in the Cloud, greater deployment flexibility, reduced costs, and faster time to market. Let me share some of that feedback with you now.

Security and Flexibility through Multi-Tenancy

Jeffrey Brown, Senior Development Project Manager at Infor notes, “Progress provides us with the technology to power our Infor10 Distribution Business, a distribution application specifically designed to help distributors with complex business models run an efficient, end-to-end operation. We are interested in the new multi-tenancy capabilities in the OpenEdge platform that could provide us with the flexibility to add an additional level of security and separation of data at the database level that is unique in the industry.”

Reducing Cost While Speeding Time to Deployment

Another Progress partner, a global medical software and services provider, used OpenEdge to develop an order management system for internal call centers. Multi-tenant Tables in OpenEdge 11 provide a viable solution for compliance with data security regulations customary to the healthcare industry. Moreover, it facilitates the roll-out of their order management system to all companies they acquire moving forward, which will be deployed in a fraction of the time, for a fraction of the cost, and with better security measures.

Efficiency and Moving Down Market with SaaS

Over in Germany, EDV-Software-Service AG (ESS), a provider of ERP software and services for the mid-size housing and real estate market, is leveraging OpenEdge 11 Multi-tenant tables to move to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to gain efficiency and expand into new markets. Their CIO Michael Förster explained, “Progress Software understands the needs of medium-sized businesses and helps us provide value to our customers and accelerate our time-time-market with new solutions. We took part in the OpenEdge Early Adopter Program and Multi-tenancy Workshop, and in only five days were given the tools and expertise needed to get our new release ready for launch in early 2012.”

I look forward to hearing more about how our customers and partners are taking advantage of OpenEdge 11.0. For more information on OpenEdge 11.0, please review the “What’s New in OpenEdge 11.0” feature highlight.

Here’s to a great start to 2012!

Thanks and as always, please feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you think.

Videos on multi-tenant table support are available on PSDN

2011-12-29T13:08:43-05:00

Support for multi-tenant tables is one of the key new features in OpenEdge 11. I've just published the first six in a series of short videos to introduce you to multi-tenancy, including how to use the new Database Administration Console, which is part of both OpenEdge Management and OpenEdge Explorer, and which lets you define tenants, domains, and all the other components of a multi-tenant database. There are also white papers that essentially duplicate the content of the videos in a form you may find easier to follow along with as you watch the videos, and a zip file containing the files you would need to use to go through the same exercise I do in the videos. Additional videos and papers will be published in the coming weeks on topics including how to create and manage multi-tenant sequences and groups, and how to convert an OpenEdge 10 database to OpenEdge 11 to take advantage of multi-tenancy support. You can find all the materials at this landing page in the PSDN OpenEdge section of communities.progress.com:

http://communities.progress.com/pcom/docs/DOC-107262

5 Signs You Need a Business Process-Enabled Application

2011-12-21T16:55:53-05:00

As I have mentioned many times before in various forums, next generation business applications need to be able to quickly adapt to business changes. The old, traditional way of hard-coding workflows is just not acceptable anymore. There is a need to drive continuous change and process improvement even within pre-existing business applications.

But how can you tell whether or not your application is in need of an update? Here are five signs that you need a business process-enabled application:

You have more menu items then puzzle pieces.
While using an application, users want to seamlessly get through their work with as few detours as possible. Unfortunately some applications make customers feel like they are putting together a puzzle – lots of pieces and no guidance as to where to begin. A business process-enabled application can guide users through the application with a customizable wizard-like interface, creating a much friendlier and better user experience.
Your workflows are set in stone.
Hard-coding workflows into your application may have worked in the past, but today’s dynamic applications shouldn’t force users to follow a path that might not be correct and/or efficient. Today’s customers demand more flexibility and continuous process improvement, and business process-enabled applications allow you to tailor processes as needed.
Your customers are NOT all created equal.
Ford used to say you can have your Model T in any color you like, as long as it’s black. Unfortunately, the same goes for many applications these days. A company will tell its customers or users that they can use the application to get the job done as long as they do X then Y then Z. That specific process might not make sense for each customer or user. They want to be able customize the workflow to work best for them, and by providing business process-enabled apps, you can provide the right solution for each specific need all with a single application.
Your IT team makes your business decisions.
Business decisions should address customer and market demands, not what works best for the IT department. Yet many applications are updated based on what the IT department thinks is best. By adding business process management (BPM) capabilities to your existing application, you can drive better decisions that are acceptable to the business folks, all while adjusting quickly and easily to market changes.
Your application picture is worth a thousand lines of code.
Many companies will collaborate with their customers or users to determine what processes and workflows should be included in an application and then capture them in some form (e.g. paper, whiteboard, graphical diagramming tool like Microsoft® Visio®). Next, they hand over the results to the developers and tell them to “build the application.” Ultimately, this means the work is done twice as the developers try to figure out how to code what they see. Business process-enabled applications let you quickly capture the process or workflow graphically and simply “plug it in” to the business logic of the application and you are off and running. Think Visio on steroids. That graphical “picture” is now worth much more than the 1000s of “words” or lines of code. It means you only do the work once and also gain better visibility into how the application functions without requiring a master’s degree in computer science. Plus, the business folks can stay engaged.

In summary, if any of these points resonate with you, maybe it's time to think about business process-enabling YOUR business application.

Thanks and, as always, please feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you think.

OpenEdge 11 is HERE!

2011-12-16T10:58:11-05:00

I just needed to update everyone with some exciting news.....OpenEdge 11.0 is now shipping!

This release planning/work has been going on for two years and after a successful Technical Preview Program and Beta Program, OpenEdge 11.0 has finally gone into production and is generally available for all of our customers and partners.

Special thanks and congratulations goes out to the entire OpenEdge Team for a job well done!

We have been spending a lot of time talking to the Industry Analysts about OpenEdge 11.0 and they have all recognized it as a modern, future-proof application development and deployment platform. It enables our customers and partners around the world to build dynamic, business process-enabled applications for secure deployment across any platform, any mobile device, and any Cloud.

I spend a lot of time travelling around the world and talking to customers/partners and what I will say is that the three key themes of next generation developemnt that everyone is talking about are: CLOUD, MOBILITY and BPM.

So, that is why I think what has been done in this latest release is so exciting. Applications of the future need to have deployment flexibility - meaning they need to be able to run on any platform, any device, as well as in any "Cloud" - be it private or public. They need to think about the USER and how they gain access to the the business application and since mobile devices are more prevalent these days then desktops - they need to be able to support any device. And finally, the next generation applications need to adapt to change in the business, so the old way of hard-coded workflows is just not acceptable and there is a need to drive continuous change and process improvement even within packaged business applications.

So let's just say we are excited to deliver a platform that meets the needs of next generation application development...for a summary of OpenEdge 11.0, please review the “What’s New in OpenEdge 11.0” feature highlight.

How Much Code Can You Write For $10,000

2011-12-13T15:38:42-05:00

Server hardware is incredibly inexpensive nowadays. For example, you can get a Dell 710R with an Intel Xeon 5690 6-core cpu, 32 gigabytes of RAM, a two-port Fibre-Channel host bus adapter, and dual gigabit Ethernet for less than $8000. Folks, that is a pretty stout box. And you can get even larger ones and much more memory.

What it comes down to is that you can probably afford as much memory and as many cpu cycles as you will ever need. Disk storage is not very expensive either.

The question is, how will this affect how you design your applications?

I used to think that it was necessary to build "stateless" applications so you could have enough scalability and minimize the number of of AppServer agents you have to run.

Now I wonder whether it is worth it. It is definitely less work to build stateful applications and dedicate an agent to each client. With such powerful servers as the one I described above, it may even turn out to be practical.

Cool Stuff: OpenEdge 11 Multi-tenancy

2011-10-25T12:12:11-04:00

One of the most important and useful new capabilities in the upcoming OpenEdge 11 release (planned for December 2011) is direct support for multi-tenancy in the database. What is multi-tenancy and why would I want one? Read on and I'll tell you.

The notion of multi-tenancy arises in the field of Software-as-a-Service (aka SaaS). When a vendor offers an application to be used as a "service", its customers do not have to buy a computer system to run the application on, nor do they have to have staff trained in the care and feeding of the system or backing up the data. Instead, customers subscribe to the service and the vendor does all of that. The customer simply uses the application over the Internet and has no idea where it is or what computer it is in. When you use a search engine, you don't know where it is and it doesn't matter. It's the same with SaaS applications. A SaaS application you are probably already familiar with is email. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and most ISP's run email servers for their subscribers. You don't have to know anything except where to log in. Someone else is responsible for everything to do with operating and maintaining the service. You just receive, read, compose and send your mail.

All this is very easy, even trivial, for the Software-as-a-Service customer. But what about the poor vendor? The vendor has to do all that messy IT stuff. Is he going to have a dedicated computer for each of the customers, as they would if they were running the application on their own computer? No, of course not. The vendor is going do everything possible to hold their operating costs as low as they can. That is where multi-tenancy comes in. Each of the SaaS vendor's customers is called a "tenant", a word taken from the rental housing market. In an apartment block we can have many tenants in the same building, all living in separate spaces. Similarly, we can put many application tenants into the same computer.

With a number of tenants sharing the same computer, the SaaS vendor has fewer machines to buy, fewer machines to take care of, and less work to do. No tenant can see the other tenants or their data and in fact do not know anything about them or their existence. Quite a number of the SaaS vendors do this. Since it is very simple to with OpenEdge, many of them have created a separate database for each tenant. But that means you have to do backups, schema changes, and other maintenance functions individually for each tenant's database. It would be much better if tenants could share the database too. We call this database multi-tenancy.

In OpenEdge 10 and before, with quite a bit of work, you can achieve database multi-tenancy. Some of our partners have rolled up their sleeves and done it. What you need to do is this:

First, add a "tenant identifier" column to every table. This tenant id column is a column that contains a unique identification number, perhaps an integer, assigned to each tenant. The value indicates which tenant owns the data in each row of the table.
Next, add the tenant id column to every index as the leading key component.
Create a table to store the tenant names and their tenant id's and assign an id to each tenant.
Then, go through all the code in your application and everywhere that a new table row is created, assign the correct value to the row's tenant id column.
You also have to invent a way to keep track of which tenant id is currently in effect.
Finally, go through all the code in the application again and find all the queries. Modify each WHERE clause to add a term that says "(tenantId = currentTenant) and ". Don't forget CAN-FIND. And make sure to add the tenant id term for each table in a multi-table query.

Once you do all those things, you can have database multi-tenancy. But in addition from the obvious fact that taking this approach is labor-intensive and invasive, there are a number of other disadvantages. I will list just a few here:

0) It is error prone. If you make a mistake when you change the code to do multi-tenancy, the wrong tenant's data will be returned. Or if you forget when you or another developer is fixing a bug, the wrong tenant's data will be returned.

1) Even if you use Type ii data areas, rows from multiple tenants will be commingled in the same data blocks and the same table's allocation clusters. This negates many of the advantages of using Type ii data areas. You get lower I/O efficiency because one tenant will have to read a data block that contains other tenants' data. Your customers will probably have the perception (whether true or not) that commingling their data reduces its security.

2) You can't do per-tenant maintenance easily. How do you reindex just one tenant's data?

3) How do you restore one tenant's data when they do something foolish like run end of month processing in the middle of the month?

4) You can't do per-tenant disk space allocation or disk space usage tracking very easily, if at all.

5) There is lock interference among tenants. Table-locks can lock out all the other tenants.

In spite of the disadvantages, I think the advantages far outweigh them and it is worth considering the use of this approach. But what if you could eliminate all the disadvantages? What if you could have your cake and eat it too? That's where OpenEdge 11 comes in. All that work I said you have to do? Gone. All those disadvantages I listed? All gone. OpenEdge 11 does all the hard work.

With the OpenEdge 11 RDBMS, database multi-tenancy is an inbuilt feature. The database knows what tenants are, who they are, and where their data are. It knows where to put new data and where to get existing data for each and every tenant. You do not have to modify all of the data access parts of your application. In fact, you shouldn't have to change much of anything! Most of your code should just work.

Well, all right, maybe you do have to make a few changes. Those changes have to do with how a user logs in to the application and the database and how the user's identify is verified. As I said, the database knows about tenants. But you will have to tell it which tenant a user belongs to. In the 4GL we use something called the CLIENT-PRINCIPAL to help in detraining that.

The CLIENT-PRINCIPAL (aka the "cp") is an inbuilt and extensible security token that we added to OpenEdge a few years ago, in the 10.1 release. The cp encapsulates a user's identity once it has been validated. In OpenEdge 11 we use the cp (with some enhancements) to encapsulate both user identity and tenant identity. Depending on which cp token is currently in effect in the 4GL runtime, the database uses the tenant id to decide what data to return for a query. For code running in AppServers and accessing the database on behalf of different users at different times, the AppServer can easily switch the cp that is in effect to that of the user that made the AppServer call.

To get ready for OpenEdge 11, you should learn about the CLIENT-PRINCIPAL. The name may sound a bit intimidating but it is really very easy to use. It takes only 3 lines of code to make one and to validate the user's identity. Go and watch the video of Sarah Marshall's Exchange Online 2010 talk over on PSDN.

In the OpenEdge 11 RDBMS, each tenant gets a separate data partition for each multi-tenant table (and not every table has to be made multi-tenant), and each data partition has its own associated index partitions. The tenant id in the cp is used to control which data partition to fetch table rows from and a tenant only gets to see their own data (and data in regular shared tables). We also have a special tenant called the "super tenant", conceptually similar to the UNIX root user, that is allowed to see /all/ the data.

This scheme works really well, is very efficient, and requires very few application changes. There are of course a lot of other things in OpenEdge 11. But I don't have space to talk about them just now and we will have to do that another time.

I hope you will like the new release. It is really cool.

Imitation is the Highest Form of Flattery

2011-10-07T17:02:50-04:00

It’s nice to be first…

First makes you a thought leader. First means you are ahead of the curve. First tells everyone else “follow me…”

On September 20, 2011, Progress announced the general availability of Progress® Arcade™ - a portal environment for simplifying the deployment of SaaS applications in the Cloud. The Arcade platform is Cloud agnostic to prevent vendor lock-in, thanks to a partnership with RightScale. It’s so simple to use, it only takes a handful of mouse clicks to go from zero to the Cloud. You can move your application and data back and forth from the Cloud if you require without restriction. Initially, Amazon is the Cloud vendor for Arcade, with others following soon.

Now, read this:

On October 6, 2011 at Oracle’s OpenWorld Conference, CEO Larry Ellison announced the Oracle Public Cloud, which I happened to learn about from a blog post on TechCrunch. According to Ellison, the Oracle Public Cloud is a platform for the deployment of Oracle applications in the Cloud. It avoids vendor lock-in through Cloud interoperability. It allows the application and data to move back and forth from the Cloud if needed. And, it can “play nice” with Amazon.

Sound familiar? It sure does.

Progress was first to market with Arcade. Oracle was first as well – first to follow!

Again, it’s nice to be first…

Thanks and please feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you think.

PSDN Video Series on OpenEdge BPM

2011-07-25T15:32:00-04:00

A new series of informative and instructional videos and accompanying white papers is now available on the PSDN community of communities.progress.com, on the top-level OpenEdge product page, entitled Building Business Process Applications Using OpenEdge BPM (Business Process Management). This video series introduces the Progress Savvion product to an OpenEdge audience, and provides examples and instruction on how to build business processes and connect them to an OpenEdge application written in ABL, using the new AutoEdge | The Factory sample application as a source of examples. Initial topics include The Value of Business Process Management, Building and Running Your First Process, Using the Savvion Form Builder, and Using Application Data in Forms. The initial series is based on OpenEdge release 10.2B and Savvion release 7.6.1. Additional videos and papers on other topics will be forthcoming, including topics on features new to OpenEdge release 11 and further releases of Savvion.

These videos complement other series already available at the same location, on Getting Started with and Using OpenEdge Architect, Using Visual Designer and GUI for .NET, Introduction to ABL Classes, Foundations of Rich Internet Applications (RIA), and Using Silverlight with RIA Services.

You can find the OEBPM videos at this URL: http://communities.progress.com/pcom/docs/DOC-106994. Links to all the video series can be found on the top-level OpenEdge product page here: http://communities.progress.com/pcom/community/psdn/openedge.

All About the Cloud...

2011-05-31T11:43:50-04:00

Last week I spent 3 days at the 'All About The Cloud' conference in San Francisco, an event that is primarily targeted at ISV's, and where for the first time Progress had a booth in the vendor Expo. Let's just review that, Progress had a booth at a Cloud conference, to many that may come as a bit of a surprise, a welcome one I hope! So what does Progress have to offer with regards to Cloud? More than you may realize.

If you read my last Blog post you will know about Progress Arcade, our initiative to simplify the task of getting to the Cloud for our customers & partners. In addition to Progress Arcade, there is also the work that the DataDirect folks have been doing around connectivity with the DataDirect XE for JDBC, Salesforce.com driver that enables Java based SQL to connect directly to Salesforce.com using JDBC, making it easier and faster to query and modify data in Salesforce.com from custom-developed and commercial Java-based applications. Last, but certainly not least, there is the Cloud Ecosystem vision that was delivered by Progress CTO John Bates at the recent Analyst Day in New York, which envisions the concept of Vertically specialized ecosystems utilizing Solution Accelerators running in the Cloud, all heady stuff!

The general theme of the conference was around the concepts of Cloud, and its perceived value and adoption, with each speaker having some strong numbers to back things up:

Bill McNee from Saugatuck Research asserted that 'By 2015, 50% of new IT spend will be based upon some element of Cloud'
Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal - 'Every Business will be in the Cloud in the next 10 years, it's just one of those inevitable things'
Matt Thompson of Microsoft - 'By 2014, Greater than 80% of all new software will be deployed in the Cloud, with 33% of all business applications being consumed via SaaS'

It was also interesting to hear from Matt Thompson that the investment being made by Microsoft into Cloud is the single biggest investment in Microsoft's history, period, and by an order of magnitude.

In addition to the booth, Progress also had a breakout session where our very own Colleen Smith, along with the CEO of RightScale, and the ISV Manager for Amazon Web Services, discussed the topic of Successfully Partnering in the Cloud, and how through building Progress Arcade we have partnered to have a solution that is a win-win for all parties involved. Maybe that should be a win-win-win...:-) Talking of Arcade there is a great article by Martin Banks 'Progress aims to open Cloud by abstracting it' that discusses the potential of opening up the Cloud to the non-tech-savvy brand masters via Progress Arcade!

One cautionary note in a keynote speech by Treb Ryan, CEO of OpSource, and also a guy who sold a company for $1.4b, yes, that's a b, was the issue of Cloud vendor lock-in, The concern that once an application is deployed with one vendor, how easy is it to move to a different vendor, especially in light of the recent Amazon outage. Ryan's longer term vision was that of peer Clouds, which just as with peer networks, are transparent to the application and it's users, but the application can be seamlessly moved from one Cloud to another. It's an interesting concept and will be something to watch, but he also stated that the only viable solution to achieve this today was by utilizing RightScale. Remember them, the company that we at Progress are partnering with for our win-win-win!

Overall it was a great conference, well attended, we had some good discussions at the booth, and some cool feedback following the presentation by Colleen & co. But it's also good to see Progress is at the vanguard of what's happening, as Jim Whitehurst, CEO of RedHat said in his keynote, "Cloud is a fundamental paradigm shift, like the move from mainframe to client server', and I couldn't agree more!

Thanks for reading

Mike