On the Road Again…

When Willie Nelson was “hittin’ the road” back in the 80’s, computers were big, expensive monsters securely locked up in datacenters under ground. Thirty or so years, and several generations of computing later, powerful computers are in your pocket as smart phones and mobile devices are the “new normal” and mobility solutions for business applications are moving to the mainstream.

First movers in the OpenEdge community are already achieving a competitive advantage by opening up their business applications to an increasingly mobile workforce. Use cases in this context are broad and varied — ad-hoc access to the current state of an order is as critical for business as is the ability to retain context and state such that “knowledge workers” can be an integral part of a business process without being constrained to a desk.

Here at Progress, we’re architecting a comprehensive mobility solution for our customers and partners which will enable them to evolve their business applications to take full advantage of this trend. One of our main design goals is to retain the productivity advantages inherent to the OpenEdge platform while at the same time enabling the development of sophisticated solutions for mobility. As part of the process, we are working closely with our ISV partners and customers to better understand use cases and share our thoughts and plans around an architected mobility solution for the OpenEdge platform.

As I said, we’re very keen to open up the design process and listen carefully to the requirements of the OpenEdge Community.

• What are your plans for extending the reach of your existing OpenEdge business solutions to the mobile workforce?
• What use cases do you envisage — ad-hoc access, access patterns demanding that context and state is retained, i.e. allow mobile workers role-based access to a stateful business process?
• Are you thinking about developing Mobile apps for submission to an AppStore which would seamlessly integrate with existing OpenEdge applications?
• What are your thoughts around HTML5 and/or device-specific solutions leveraging native capabilities of iOS and Android devices?

We’d love to know and this is the time to get you voices heard!

In a subsequent post, I’ll take this “down a notch” and discuss some of the technology aspects influencing our architectural decisions.

Exciting times – gotta hit the road again…