See our video interviews with Progress Software executives and clients below, including newly appointed VP and Asia Pacific chief, Keith Budge (pictured)
Rust Report Editor David Varga travelled to Boston as a guest of Progress Software to Progress Revolution Boston 2011, a marquee promotional event drawing customers, partners and stakeholders together to witness Responsive Process Management (RPM) and other recent solutions. Whilst the Progress Software brand footprint pales next to competitors IBM and Oracle, the company’s evolving suite of complimentary technologies, either developed or recently acquired by Progress, look set to gain greater traction in the ANZ region in the near future.
Not so long ago in the Dot-com era, the sense of technological possibility that was at the heart of the much-hyped emerging ‘new economy’ looked set to deliver a breath-taking world constructed with a futurist’s imagination. Writers like former Wired editor Kevin Kelly published best-selling tomes about a brave new world of smart networks, rhizome-like intelligent AI systems, paperless e-dollar utopias, technology-driven chorums of networked communities, digital physics, and revolutionary killer apps. Without the technology to back up the rhetoric, much of the hype remained in the realm of vapourware, and many businesses and investors were burnt.
As we cautiously revisit what many are calling the second technology boom, it’s important to stop and think how much of that originally imagined technological idealisation is closer to reality, or if not, already here. Mobile devices have meant the post-PC era is now upon us; ubiquitous broadband and wireless mean connectivity to nodes or the cloud are now constants; GPS has delivered a new generation of location specific apps with realtime functionality; sector-wide shifts forced by the tremendous success of Apple in humanising and simplifying design values and interfaces have re-defined how devices are conceived; cross-generational techno-literacy is increasing and younger people in particular now adopt the emerging systems seamlessly; the cloud is the new repository of future possibility; and, social networking is no longer a fashionable fad but an unquestionable business imperative, as evidenced by Facebook’s status as largest human institution ever created.
It is in light of recent technological realisation that we should consider the Progress Revolution 2011 event and Progress Software’s RPM solutions. Like other forward-thinking companies, Progress is making the most of what has become recently achievable, applying holistic solutions to many contemporary and emerging business challenges.
Nearly a thousand people gathered in Boston, Progress Software’s global HQ, to hear company speakers and guests outline answers to an increasingly common question: how can businesses traverse a flux of exploding realtime information flows to make meaningful, timely decisions that deliver business value, either through mitigating risk or identifying opportunities?
To coincide with the conference, a Progress-sponsored Economist Intelligence Unit survey was released that showed 74% of business respondents feel the pace of change in their industry’s operating environment has increased over the past five years. The survey also found that majority of businesses (79%) recognise that it is important to respond quickly or in realtime to these changes, but nearly half (48%) think the amount of time it takes them to make key decisions has increased over the past five years. Only 22% say that it has declined.
The other highlighted theme was dealing with risk, and the constant disruption to business which can occur in the form of flash crashes and economic shocks, or natural disasters such as the Japan earthquake, to name but a few.
Technological enhancement itself poses great potential for risk. As French cultural theorist and urbanist Paul Virilio once famously stated, within every new technology lies an an-built, often hidden, accident—what became known as the ‘Integral Accident’. With the invention of air travel came the air disaster for example, and arriving soon after the wonders of electronic mail was the infernal SPAM industry. Whilst we’ve seen a jump in recent technological evolution, recent shifts also dictate new and unforeseen potential accidents are just waiting to happen. In the Progress example, where many of their solutions are applied to capital and financial markets (Commonwealth Bank and the ANZ are APAC customers), the rise of instantaneous global trading has also given rise to potential ‘fat finger’ crises—where a trader presses the wrong key or adds a zero too many on an electronic trading system—such as the trillion dollar Wall Street crash of May 6 last year.
The Progress solution involves applying complete visibility to business operations, to ensure risk can be intelligently detected, and where possible, responded to in realtime.
With technology churn rates also high as more new systems come online, the Progress answer to minimising risk and maximising business opportunity is a suite of solutions that are designed to complement and work with, rather than necessarily replace, existing legacy systems.
We interviewed key Progress spokespeople to talk about the Progress Revolution, and some of their products, which include: Actional, Apama, Artix, Control Tower, DataDirect Connect, DataDirect, Data Integration Suite, DataDirect Shadow, DataXtend, FuseSource, ObjectStore, OpenEdge, Orbacus, Orbix, RPM Suite, Savvion, and Sonic.
- Dr. John Bates, CTO, Progress Software
- Keith Budge, newly appointed VP, Asia-Pacific, Progress Software
- John Goodson, SVP Products, Progress Software
- Stephanie Renda, CEO, match2blue
- Sanjay Kumar, VP, Telecommunications and Media, Progress Software
Visit http://vimeopro.com/user5814904/progress-revolutions to see the interviews.
The conference theme of making mission critical decisions in realtime scenarios also saw appearances by former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani and America’s favourite media hero, pilot Chesley Sullenberger.
For Giuliani, defeating rising crime and improving employment participation rates in NYC was all about gathering the right information and using this intelligence to allocate resources. He also attributed his success in general to knowing his own weaknesses and hiring advisers with strengths in areas where he himself was less capable. Whilst September 11 wasn’t a scenario that had been predicted, a number of other disaster eventualities had, which meant existing plans were adapted and enacted rapidly for the 9/11 crisis.
For Sullenberger, ditching a loaded airliner into the Hudson was only possible because of a lifetime of training and constant re-training to perfect his skills, all of which laid the basis for an intuitive capability to make the right choices when needed most. Critically, his triumph over adversity involved knowing which safety procedures to ignore when complex decisions needed to be made in milliseconds.
