Wow, what a great opening day of the Progress Exchange Online 2010 Conference – and a great turn out too! Today we welcomed over 2,000 attendees from 66 countries around the world. We even had over 100 attendees in Australia listening to sessions at 1:00am!
We really like the concept of a virtual conference, as we would not otherwise be able to reach as many dedicated users. It shows how global not only our partner and customer base is, but also the interest around the world in hearing about solutions that enable the development of more operationally responsiveness business applications.
Rick Reidy and Dr. John Bates kicked the conference off with a great general session on Progress Today and Responsive Process Management. They were able to highlight what Progress is doing for our existing customers and partners – specifically providing them with the solutions needed to address changing business requirements.
And that brings me to what today was all about – two big announcements about our OpenEdge SaaS platform.
The first announcement was about Progress Arcade. OpenEdge ISVs and end users are telling us they want to be able to move to the cloud quickly and easily – so it was Progress’s goal to simplify this move as much as possible. The Arcade environment provides software developers with the means to test, demonstrate, and deploy their cloud-enabled business applications using the integrated Progress OpenEdge SaaS platform.
The second announcement was our Progress OpenEdge BPM initiative. Business applications are continuing to evolve and so is the way they are being built. We are integrating the business process modeling, monitoring and management capabilities of the Progress Savvion™ BPM product with Progress OpenEdge. This will provide our ISV partners and customers with new capabilities for building applications for continuous business process improvements. This is how we see business applications being built in the future – truly business process-enabled.
After 30 years in business, hopefully our partners and customers saw today that Progress still knows how to deliver the tools they need to succeed!
I look forward to all the great sessions that will be going on tomorrow!
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.