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.