2015 was a very busy and exciting year in the area of business application development. A beautiful user interface (UI) and mobile access are increasingly becoming standard user expectations, forcing companies to adapt. As mentioned recently, over 70% of businesses worldwide spent the year modernizing for these new and emerging digital platforms.
Whether you’re already considering modernizing or not, this might sound like a lot to change. I know that change can seem scary at times. This year more than ever, it has truly resonated with me that change can also present an amazing opportunity to grow and achieve beyond past performance.
At the end of last year, Progress acquired Telerik. Telerik is the leading company out there for making beautiful applications that are designed to work across devices, from mobile phones to tablets to the desktop. Combine that with the longstanding focus of Progress® OpenEdge® on delivering a rock-solid backend platform that is second to none in the industry, and we’ve brought the best of two worlds together.
Shortly before Telerik, we also acquired BravePoint. Progress® BravePoint™ is a company that was well known for providing best-in-class consulting services for Progress products. They have over 200 combined years of experience helping companies to modernize their applications, focused not just on the technology but on their customers’ business challenges and goals. They brought to us lots of business acumen, technical expertise and a proven methodology to address a wide variety of user needs. Viewed in tandem with Telerik, we now have the tools and the support to help get our customers and partners wherever they need to go.
We spent much of 2015 integrating these new companies into the Progress family so that taking advantage of their services would be a seamless experience for all of you. However, we also kept innovating with OpenEdge itself, releasing this summer OpenEdge® Pro2™ for fast, easy data replication and version 5.5 of Corticon® Rules for OpenEdge. Not slowing down one bit, in October, we offered Telerik Platform for OpenEdge to help you take your OpenEdge apps mobile and OpenEdge 11.6 to ease your modernization efforts.
The 11.6 release also delivered the OpenEdge Developers Kit: Classroom Edition—a download of business development tools supported by online training and a network of OpenEdge experts. This is designed to support the next generation as they enter the corporate application development market. It was to promote the Classroom Edition that I took my first trip to Sophia, Bulgaria where 110 technology students spent the day learning about the OpenEdge opportunity.
It’s been a busy year. I think I logged more miles this year than I have in the last 10—which I did not think was possible—but meeting with all of the OpenEdge customers and partners around the world makes my job even more enjoyable!
It’s been busy for a while actually—in the last four years we’ve delivered more products and releases than in the 10 years previous. We are absolutely focused on continuing to innovate and embracing the latest technologies to keep our customers and partners relevant. We don’t just want you to be current, we want to help you lead the way.
There is so much to get excited about when it comes to the digital transformations that are taking place right now. Every day more businesses are moving past the desktop, focusing on the user experience and grabbing new customers they could never reach before. At the same time, they’re enhancing the feature set for their current users by making them beautiful and mobile, keeping them from turning to other solutions.
We’ve spent much of 2015 putting ourselves in the best possible position to help our customers and partners take the leap into the next generation of technology. In 2016, we hope you’ll join us in not being afraid of change, and let us guide you through your transformation journey. OpenEdge has never been better than it is today, or more ready for what’s coming in the future. Happy New Years to all and I look forward to a successful 2016!
Colleen Smith
Colleen Smith is Vice President, Customer Advocacy at Progress. In this role, she is responsible for ensuring customer focus and accountability for improving the company’s relationship with its customers and partners, as it relates to the use of Progress core products. Smith joined the company in 2005 with 20 years of enterprise software marketing, sales and product strategy experience, and has helped transform software companies into industry leaders, built strategic partnerships, designed acquisition strategies and moved companies through aggressive growth stages.