Portland chooses Progress-based SeaTrak to automate auctions

Maine's Portland Fish Exchange has deployed the seafood inventory system SeaTrak to provide bar-code-based inventory management of every fish container and feed their daily auction.

DC Systems built SeaTrak using Progress OpenEdge, SonicMQ, bar codes and wireless technology to track fish as they are handled in the fish exchange and auctioned online. This new system reduces fish data collection errors, lets workers to unload, sort and stage the fish more quickly, and gives Portland a new, larger market by offering its auction online to buyers beyond New England.

Manually entering data at a pier has been an error-prone process. DC Systems understood our data collection, communications, inventory and warehousing needs and proposed an innovative solution that was very appealing to us. This new bar coding system not only saved us tens of thousands of dollars in capital equipment purchases, it also allowed us to enhance our data collection accuracy and increase employee productivity. Employees never have to touch a keyboard to enter information, and they can do their jobs on the docks without worrying about keying in data. - Bert Jongerden, General Manager of the Portland Fish Exchange

DC Systems is another example of Progress Application Partners automating business with vertical market software. Read the rest of the article on ebizQ. Join the industry trade association for Progress OpenEdge developers at Application Partner Buisiness Council.

Big change for Progress?

One of the benefits us "old timers" get as Progress Software buys more mainstream and less embedded technologies is some exposure in the press. OpenEdge (read as Progress 4GL) rarely comes up on the radar and we rarely see industry, much less analyst, coverage of the business software building tools we love so much. One shining example did emerge last week that gives me hope at the same time it causes me no small amount of concern.

Neil Ward-Dutton posted a entry about Progress in the Software Infrastructure for Business Value blog over at ebiz. He was covering the SOA offerings and ended up chatting with PSC execs via Twitter. That conversation fueled his blog post and he made a very interesting point about Progress Software.

The most interesting bit, however, was a comment on Neil's blog from Mark Palmer. His response shone some much-needed light into what Progress Software is thinking and what choices Rick Reidy is facing.

Neil observed that Progress Software is like Unilever: a conglomerate of technologies, not always aligned, but most definitely not unified under a single brand or moniker. The effect of which is the individual technologies gain no benefit from being part of the Progress Software umbrella. Well put.

Mark, a former GM at Apama, chimed in and pointed out that Joe Alsop's strategy was, indeed, that of balkanization and Rick now has to choose how to move forward. Those choices will very much so affect Application Partners and I encourage each of you to join the conversation either at Neil's blog on in the forums at the Application Partner Business Council.

Regardless of whether or not the Progress APs can sway Rick one way or another in his decision, we do need to give him candid input, now, and he needs to hear from us what we need the final result to do for our OpenEdge-based software development businesses. Where PSC is headed, the benefits that move gives to the OpenEdge partners, and the effects on us in the meantime are all significant.

Rick Reidy Appointed President and CEO

Late last month, Progress Software announced Rick Reidy had been appointed as the new president and CEO. Joe Alsop is stepping down to allow Rick to take the leadership and will exit the board of directors when his term runs out.

Rick has been with Progress since very early on, has been a part of OpenEdge most of that time, he helped build EMEA, and more recently led the DataDirect and development at Apama. So, Rick comes from the long-standing Progress 4GL / database side of the business, knows development well and has experience with APs, how Progress works outside North America, and has recent experience with some of the new acquisitions.

That strong understanding and history with the OpenEdge side should bode well for us Application Partners. We should expect that as Rick helps Progress Software chart it's course for the coming years, the perspective of the APs will be taken into careful consideration.

No doubt you've got a daunting task ahead of you, Rick. Here's to your (and our) success!

Is Dell's channel offering good for partners?

Dell has finally stepping into the channel, is offering products and partnering with our typical distributors. This is a benefit for APs who want to offer Dell products and their name brand, but want to remain in control.
Can Dell balance its business between direct-to-consumer, whitebox solutions, and the channel? it seems so until you consider the many discounts and offers Dell hands directly to consumers and direct business customers.
ChannelInsider considers Dell's past, its pricing and our future with Dell in this interesting article.

Clouds with Progress linings

You've probably heard of cloud computing or grid computing, but you may not realize it might well be your key to big savings as you figure out how to evolve from perpetual licensing to software as a service SaaS.

Most Progress Application Partners have a perpetual licensing model. In the simplest terms that means your salespeople sell new customers a license to use one copy of your software and that copy runs on servers the customers owns and runs from their facilities. In general. This is a fine model, but it is being replaced by two new models, both of which have good benefits for you AND the customer, but require some new thinking about where the computer is located and who pays for the computer. That's where cloud computing or grid computing can make a huge difference.

When you add a hosted application (ASP) model or software as a service (SaaS) model to your offerings, you, the vendor, take on the responsibility of owning, running and maintaining the computers on which your application runs. The customer just "rents" the use of your application and, therefore, the computer the application and database are running on. This shift of I.T. responsibility from the customer to the vendor can be very beneficial for both parties, but you, the vendor, now have more to manage. The revenue model for you is far better, but you have to buy, install, maintain and upgrade a bunch of servers now. Unless you outsource that portion to someone who can do it better and cheaper.

So, how do you get the customer to pay you to run their application, own and maintain the computers, and guarantee the bandwidth is sufficient and the backups are rock-solid without buying your own data center and dedicated I.T. staff? In the old days, you 'd buy your own computers and build your own computer room or you'd rent space in a data center and "collocate" servers you bought to that data center. Nowadays, you get all that by reaching into the clouds for a tiny fraction of the cost.

Companies like Amazon and Sun have very large farms of servers and storage which they rarely use or have been purpose-bought to offer up to the needs of businesses and companies like us Application Partners.

You can literally rent a server from Amazon's EC2 service or Sun's Grid Computer Utility, have a new copy of Linux up and running, and be loading your Progress application within a few minutes. Both Amazon and Sun have created online storefronts where you "purchase" the rights to run a new virtual server, choose a pre-configured Linux image, tell it to "boot up" and log in with the root password. After installing your application, you can open the firewall so your customer can get in and, as far as they know, you've stood up a brand new server in your "virtual data center" just for them.

How does this compare to the cost of a collocated server? Great!

Type	Monthly cost	Server cost	Monthly backup
Collocation	$1,000	$3,000	$750
Amazon 1-CPU moderate I/O	$80	$0	$120
Amazon 4-CPU heavy I/O	$320	$0	$120

Allegro Consultants uses a traditional data center for much of our in-house Progress work, but we are moving to cloud computing where it makes sense. These figures come from our own data center experiences.

Amazon and Sun are able to reduce the cost to us of these services due to very high volume and a great degree of virtualization. So, the big point here is if you leverage these cloud computing resources, you can cut out a great deal of cost for the customer, cost that would normally be paid to someone else.

Cloud computing won't solve all the world's troubles and is not perfect for every end user company, but APs need to understand what it does mean for them so they can make a strategic choice to include it in their plans or not.

Keeping an eye on the enemy

Many Progress Application Partners are not exactly what you would call fans of Microsoft. Progress APs have been working with the Progress 4GL and Progress OpenEdge platform for decades and have had great success building business software for vertical markets. Microsoft has always seemed to be the "big dog" or the unwelcome giant in related areas. Until recently, the Microsoft Windows platform has been a bane to Progress APs rather than a viable platform. This is often the topic of conversation between members at the Application Partner Business Council.

Regardless of your technical-religious beliefs, it is important to recognize that the Microsoft Windows desktop and application that run natively on it account for more than 90% of the business market. That doesn't mean you should seek to be just like them, but it does mean that your application needs to compete with these applications and the way they look.

To that end, you should keep a close eye on what Microsoft is doing and, more importantly, what modern Microsoft-based applications look like because that is what your customers will expect your application to look like. Or better.

I find it extremely valuable to subscribe to and scan through Microsoft-centric development industry magazines. Ones like Redmond Developer give me three things in each issue:

• Some inside, albeit biased, information about what the latest and next generation of Microsoft tools and platforms will do and be named
• Plenty of advertisements for develop tool and user interface add ons, the ones that Microsoft developers will be using to steal away my prospects with good looks before they realize there's not much under the hood
• A "horror story" column each issue that transcends Microsoft and reminds all of us there are situations to avoid in the software development world

So, make yourself more competitive and more capable of succeeding in your next sales call: read a few Microsoft industry magazines, understand what they are up to, recognize the kind of look-and-feel your customers expect from you, and be prepared to speak to it or guide your development in ways that keep customers from buying just based on looks alone.

And if you're ready to sell your soul in exchange for satisfying your Microsoft-crazed customers, you can have a look at the Allegro website or the Virginia Progress Users Group website where you'll find the recent PUG presentation on how Progress OpenEdge 10.2 includes the Advanced GUI which allows regular Progress 4GL (or Progress ABL, whatever you want to call it) to create modern Microsoft Windows interfaces. No more "wow, that looks as good as Windows 3.1" remarks.