Progress and the Sound of SOA; QAD Goes SaaS | AMR Research
Progress and the Sound of SOA; QAD Goes SaaS | AMR Research
The halls were alive with the sound of SOA.
While it may be hard to visualize Julie Andrews singing that line as she stood overlooking the countryside near Salzburg, it was the first thing I thought of as I watched a demo at Progress Software’s Partner Exchange 2007 event.
To demonstrate the power of service-oriented architectures (SOAs), Progress set up a demo that linked seven servers. Four of the servers were linked to Yamaha synthesizers, with each device set up to play a custom jazz piece written by Progress’ Dave Olson. The intent of the demo was to show how Progress Sonic’s enterprise service bus (ESB) could be used to orchestrate and coordinate the individual servers so that they could be linked in a seamless fashion. It worked flawlessly, and you didn’t have to be a jazz aficionado to be impressed.
“I feel MIDI”
The idea for the demo was conceived two months ago. It was completed by a single programmer in six weeks. For the most part, it used all off-the-shelf technology that is available today. The one exception was a custom web service called Player that was downloaded from a MIDI Java site (MIDI is an acronym for Musical Instrument Digital Interface). There’s a fair amount of technology hidden in the demo, including a publish-and-subscribe messaging architecture, BPEL for authoring, widespread use of XML documents, and an event backbone. One Progress executive spent over 40 minutes trying to explain to me how it actually worked. He gave up when he realized it would be easier to teach a pig to sing.
Now, replace the Yamaha devices with software from SAP, QAD, Business Objects, PeopleSoft, and MatrixOne. Imagine these five software packages connected seamlessly to Sonic. That’s the heterogeneous architecture that QAD has proposed to one large customer that it shares with SAP. Getting SAP to move from its NetWeaver-only stance, however, will be the real challenge.
QAD has developed two products based on Sonic: Distributed Order Management and Just-in-Time Sequencer. The former was first launched four years ago, while the latter uses Sonic to connect with various shop-floor control systems. More on QAD and Progress later.
Infor, the world’s third largest enterprise applications vendor after SAP and Oracle, is another Sonic supporter. At the event, Infor’s Tom Lynch told me that his company has standardized on Progress as its SOA provider. Infor’s products span a wide range of architectures from .NET to J2EE. Sonic allows it to mix and match Microsoft products, IBM’s WebSphere and hardware platforms, and other third-party integration products.
Progress: A surplus of brands
There’s a lot more to Progress than just Sonic. The company may be best known for its 4GL development environment. The 4GL is at the core of QAD’s ERP applications and is the foundation of several Infor products. It has since morphed into the broader application development platform now known as Progress OpenEdge. There are more than 60,000 OpenEdge customers, including 90% of the Fortune 500.
Progress Apama is one of the newest extensions of the company’s suite. It is designed to aid in complex event processing, but the best way to describe it may be to summarize the demo. A major international stock exchange uses it to identify potential insider trading in individual stocks. Apama tracks suspicious activities or unusual price movements right back to the trading partners. This is then paired with any subsequent announcements that may later cause the share price to rise or fall. The implied linkage being that the buyer or seller had advanced knowledge of good or bad news.
While banks and other financial institutions make up the bulk of Apama users, Manuvis, a small Progress applications partner, uses it to track and resolve events on the factory floor. As I talked to Manuvis and other partners, I immediately developed a whole host of potential applications for retailers and manufacturers too, especially along the extended value chain. These could include managing RFID data, logistics disruptions, or huge volumes of point-of-sale data.
Besides Sonic and Apama, other brands include Progress Actional (web services management and SOA governance), DataDirect Shadow (mainframe integration), DataDirect (data connectivity software), Progress DataXtend (the industry’s first model-driven semantic integration tool), Progress EasyAsk (natural language query tool), and Progress ObjectStore (object data management). All told, Progress delivered more than 30 new products last year.
While at the conference, I had the opportunity to talk to Progress partners about the company. During one session, I had the chance to ask three executives the same question: “If you had 30 minutes with Dave Ireland (president of the OpenEdge business unit), what advice would you give him or what product or service would you ask him to deliver?” All three had the same answer: make Sonic and the other SOA products as easy to configure and extend as OpenEdge.
QAD: Demand for “on demand” up five times in just two months
When I got back from Phoenix, I sent Pam Lopker an e-mail asking if we could talk about Progress and its SOA products. Ms. Lopker and her husband Karl started QAD in 1979. During that time, the customer base has grown to 5,500.
She was joined on the call by Hans Jansen, QAD’s chief technology officer. When asked about Sonic, both had the same response: “It’s a great product. It’s No. 1 in ESB, but no one knows it.”
After talking about SOA for a while, the conversation switched to Apama, and then to Semantic Integrator and the need for semantic mapping before settling on software as a service (SaaS). SaaS, along with SOA and Apama, were the three primary themes at the Progress event.
QAD has offered SaaS software for over five years. Its first on-demand offering was Supplier Visualization, which is used by 2,094 companies. Two months ago the company decided to sell its core QAD Enterprise Applications 2007 (the abbreviated nomenclature is QAD 2007) on premises, on demand, or on an appliance.
Ms. Lopker said that she told her people that the first-year demand for the SaaS version of QAD 2007 would be 10 to 20 small companies, with an average deployment of 5 to 10 seats. All told, she foresaw a total customer base of 100 seats, but she was way off. In less than 60 days, there were 540 users running QAD as a service.
What surprised her most was the amount of interest generated by larger companies, not the small and midsize businesses she expected. Big companies see the on-demand model as faster to implement and upgrade. These same large customers also see it as a faster and less-expensive way of doing instance consolidations and managing divestitures.
We closed the conversation with a brief discussion of QAD’s latest killer app, a desktop shipping product acquired with last summer’s purchase of Precision Software Limited. It allows customers to determine which shipper offers the lowest price, provides track-and-trace functionality, and manages the whole global trade process. The new software has opened many new first-time accounts for QAD, including Google, Apple, and GE.
The halls were alive with the sound of SOA.
While it may be hard to visualize Julie Andrews singing that line as she stood overlooking the countryside near Salzburg, it was the first thing I thought of as I watched a demo at Progress Software’s Partner Exchange 2007 event.
To demonstrate the power of service-oriented architectures (SOAs), Progress set up a demo that linked seven servers. Four of the servers were linked to Yamaha synthesizers, with each device set up to play a custom jazz piece written by Progress’ Dave Olson. The intent of the demo was to show how Progress Sonic’s enterprise service bus (ESB) could be used to orchestrate and coordinate the individual servers so that they could be linked in a seamless fashion. It worked flawlessly, and you didn’t have to be a jazz aficionado to be impressed.
“I feel MIDI”
The idea for the demo was conceived two months ago. It was completed by a single programmer in six weeks. For the most part, it used all off-the-shelf technology that is available today. The one exception was a custom web service called Player that was downloaded from a MIDI Java site (MIDI is an acronym for Musical Instrument Digital Interface). There’s a fair amount of technology hidden in the demo, including a publish-and-subscribe messaging architecture, BPEL for authoring, widespread use of XML documents, and an event backbone. One Progress executive spent over 40 minutes trying to explain to me how it actually worked. He gave up when he realized it would be easier to teach a pig to sing.
Now, replace the Yamaha devices with software from SAP, QAD, Business Objects, PeopleSoft, and MatrixOne. Imagine these five software packages connected seamlessly to Sonic. That’s the heterogeneous architecture that QAD has proposed to one large customer that it shares with SAP. Getting SAP to move from its NetWeaver-only stance, however, will be the real challenge.
QAD has developed two products based on Sonic: Distributed Order Management and Just-in-Time Sequencer. The former was first launched four years ago, while the latter uses Sonic to connect with various shop-floor control systems. More on QAD and Progress later.
Infor, the world’s third largest enterprise applications vendor after SAP and Oracle, is another Sonic supporter. At the event, Infor’s Tom Lynch told me that his company has standardized on Progress as its SOA provider. Infor’s products span a wide range of architectures from .NET to J2EE. Sonic allows it to mix and match Microsoft products, IBM’s WebSphere and hardware platforms, and other third-party integration products.
Progress: A surplus of brands
There’s a lot more to Progress than just Sonic. The company may be best known for its 4GL development environment. The 4GL is at the core of QAD’s ERP applications and is the foundation of several Infor products. It has since morphed into the broader application development platform now known as Progress OpenEdge. There are more than 60,000 OpenEdge customers, including 90% of the Fortune 500.
Progress Apama is one of the newest extensions of the company’s suite. It is designed to aid in complex event processing, but the best way to describe it may be to summarize the demo. A major international stock exchange uses it to identify potential insider trading in individual stocks. Apama tracks suspicious activities or unusual price movements right back to the trading partners. This is then paired with any subsequent announcements that may later cause the share price to rise or fall. The implied linkage being that the buyer or seller had advanced knowledge of good or bad news.
While banks and other financial institutions make up the bulk of Apama users, Manuvis, a small Progress applications partner, uses it to track and resolve events on the factory floor. As I talked to Manuvis and other partners, I immediately developed a whole host of potential applications for retailers and manufacturers too, especially along the extended value chain. These could include managing RFID data, logistics disruptions, or huge volumes of point-of-sale data.
Besides Sonic and Apama, other brands include Progress Actional (web services management and SOA governance), DataDirect Shadow (mainframe integration), DataDirect (data connectivity software), Progress DataXtend (the industry’s first model-driven semantic integration tool), Progress EasyAsk (natural language query tool), and Progress ObjectStore (object data management). All told, Progress delivered more than 30 new products last year.
While at the conference, I had the opportunity to talk to Progress partners about the company. During one session, I had the chance to ask three executives the same question: “If you had 30 minutes with Dave Ireland (president of the OpenEdge business unit), what advice would you give him or what product or service would you ask him to deliver?” All three had the same answer: make Sonic and the other SOA products as easy to configure and extend as OpenEdge.
QAD: Demand for “on demand” up five times in just two months
When I got back from Phoenix, I sent Pam Lopker an e-mail asking if we could talk about Progress and its SOA products. Ms. Lopker and her husband Karl started QAD in 1979. During that time, the customer base has grown to 5,500.
She was joined on the call by Hans Jansen, QAD’s chief technology officer. When asked about Sonic, both had the same response: “It’s a great product. It’s No. 1 in ESB, but no one knows it.”
After talking about SOA for a while, the conversation switched to Apama, and then to Semantic Integrator and the need for semantic mapping before settling on software as a service (SaaS). SaaS, along with SOA and Apama, were the three primary themes at the Progress event.
QAD has offered SaaS software for over five years. Its first on-demand offering was Supplier Visualization, which is used by 2,094 companies. Two months ago the company decided to sell its core QAD Enterprise Applications 2007 (the abbreviated nomenclature is QAD 2007) on premises, on demand, or on an appliance.
Ms. Lopker said that she told her people that the first-year demand for the SaaS version of QAD 2007 would be 10 to 20 small companies, with an average deployment of 5 to 10 seats. All told, she foresaw a total customer base of 100 seats, but she was way off. In less than 60 days, there were 540 users running QAD as a service.
What surprised her most was the amount of interest generated by larger companies, not the small and midsize businesses she expected. Big companies see the on-demand model as faster to implement and upgrade. These same large customers also see it as a faster and less-expensive way of doing instance consolidations and managing divestitures.
We closed the conversation with a brief discussion of QAD’s latest killer app, a desktop shipping product acquired with last summer’s purchase of Precision Software Limited. It allows customers to determine which shipper offers the lowest price, provides track-and-trace functionality, and manages the whole global trade process. The new software has opened many new first-time accounts for QAD, including Google, Apple, and GE.
Labels: SOA
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