ProgressNEXT Live Blog Day 1 - Keynotes & Breakouts Recapped

We hope you're as excited as we are for ProgressNEXT, which begins today! We'll be bringing you all the latest updates from the event live on this blog post throughout the day, so be sure to come back often to see what's going on as this post will be updated regularly.

First things first - if you can't catch it in person, we will be livestreaming the ProgressNEXT Keynote Speakers, so that you can watch it from wherever you are. Just follow this link or click below to stream the keynotes live. The keynotes begin at 8:30am ET.

Watch the Keynotes

Yogesh Gupta Keynote: Cognitive, Adaptive, Connected: The Progress Vision and What it Means to You

Our CEO, Yogesh Gupta, gave a powerful keynote covering the wide range of what Progress has to offer today (he promised we'd cover the exciting stuff going on in Progress Labs at the forthcoming keynote by our CTO, Dmitri Tcherevik). He emphasized the essence of what Progress is about - and that's to make the life of software developers easier. Really, that's always been our goal, and it's just the way to do that which has changed over time. Yogesh related a story about Einstein when he was a professor, where a student complained that he had given the same test in consecutive years - how could that be fair? Einstein noted that though the questions were the same, the answers had changed, and that's definitely the case with software development today.

It wasn't Yogesh alone making this point. Tom Stein from NASA (pictured) spoke about how much faster they could share their work with the public thanks to our DevCraft tools and the customer support he received. We also heard a lot about the power of Kinvey to easily integrate with backend legacy data from Schneider Electric, and how it powers the Progress Health Cloud to securely handle sensitive health data from Canopy Health. We saw how Infor was able to quickly take their on-prem OpenEdge implementation to the cloud with minimal code rewriting, and how companies like TVH are saving time and money through predictive maintenance. There were also an inspirational story about how an app like Hello Tractor, which is built on Progress, is helping farmers in Africa get better access to tractors.

Customer Keynotes - Canopy Health, NASA and TVH

Some of the customers who features in Yogesh's keynote also had the opportunity to share their story in more detail. It was fascinating to hear these journeys using different Progress technologies, all in the service of creating modern, more efficient software.

• Canopy Health: Canopy Health is a unique health care alliance of 18 hospitals and over 5000 providers. With 45 disparate systems that need integrating, but also a desire to create an innovative, cloud- and mobile-first system to enable better access for their members, Progress Health Cloud was the perfect solution.
• NASA: NASA has been sending orbiters and rovers to Mars for some time, and in recent years they have made an effort to share that data with not only professional scientists, but citizen-scientists and students. With a limited budget, they didn't think they could both improve the UI and add features - until they discovered DevCraft, that is.
• TVH: TVH (pictured above) is a leader in replacement parts and accessories for handling materials and industrial vehicles - they work with a lot of heavy equipment that needs to work reliably. Recognizing that they are flooded with data from smart machines, they are taking the leap from preventive to predictive maintenance to put that data to work in the way the market demands today.

App Innovation Awards Part 1

Before we broke for lunch, Loren presented the first trio of our App Innovation Awards!

• Best Mobile App: This award went to Hello Tractor! We spoke about them above - they're doing really amazing work.
• Best Web Experience: Aston Martin took this one home with their beautiful site redesign, which is powered by Progress Sitefinity, and makes it easy to find out more about their cars across numerous dealerships. 
• Best Modernization Transformation: TVH was the big winner here. You've heard about their predictive maintenance efforts, and they have also modernized key systems build on OpenEdge and other Progress technologies in recent years.
  

ProgressNEXT 18 is Trending!

After the keynotes ended, we broke for lunch. While enjoying the excellent food, I discovered that ProgressNEXT is officially the #1 top trending topic on Twitter for Boston.

Join in the conversation! #ProgressNEXT18 is the hashtag to use - let us know what you think!

Lunch and Demos

While lunch was being served, there were also a number of demos on display for attendees to enjoy. The demo booths covered everything that Progress had to offer, as well as some interesting demonstrations from our partners as well. Above, you can see our Progress Labs team showing off some of our latest work around AR/VR.

Breakout Sessions - Telerik Tools, Kinvey and More

After lunch there were a range of breakout sessions covering everything from NativeScript to DataRPM to Sitefinity to OpenEdge and more. Here are some recaps from the ones I was able to attend.

Telerik R2 2018 Breakout

One of the big pieces of news from the Telerik R2 2018 breakout was the Conversational UI that is coming across our Telerik line of developer tools (as you can see in the slide above), which is really exciting - it's an industry first. A new beta of Telerik UI for AR/VR was displayed too. There were also important reminders about the versatility of Xamarin for mobile, the strength of ASP.NET Core, and the latest improvements in our leading desktop and reporting tools.

Jumpstarting Digital Business with Kinvey Breakout

In this breakout, VP of Technology Strategy and Kinvey expert Sravish Sridhar led a panel of customers and partners who implementing Progress Kinvey to propel their business forward. There was a lot of discussion around the benefits of letting a partner handle much of the technical and compliance end, and allowing developers to focus on innovative new ideas and solving business issues. As Neil Gomes of Thomas Jefferson University noted, when you can push out new ideas quickly you can change mindsets and get people to believe their ideas are worth pursuing. Having a knowledgeable partner you can call on, a fast and flexible platform to build with, and buy-in from the top of your organization were highlighted as keys to making effective digital progress.

Sitefinity's All New Content Creation

In case you missed it, Sitefinity 11 debuted today! In this session Jordan Ilchev took us through all the new features in the latest version. As someone who blogs daily, I can tell you, content creators will be happy with these changes as easier content creation was a priority for this release. Context menus and widgets do a better job of getting out of the way, leaving more space for content. Improved navigation and UI controls (direct from Kendo UI) help you get to where you need to go faster, and the HTML editor is cleaner now with color coding and suggested completion (in fact, Jordan told us they included the exact and much loved editor from Visual Studio Code). Posts also don't lock until a user changes the content, so there will be a lot less accidental locking. On the security front, HTTPS is now mandatory and a new Security Module helps keep you protected.

Connect Everything with the DataDirect Generic REST Adapter

Tony Lavinio explained to us the basics of REST connectivity and the not-yet-complete DataDirect Generic REST Adapter (codenamed Sagamore). He described it with a Star Trek analogy - the reason Scotty had to identify all the engine problems by crawling into a Jeffery's Tube in the original, and LaForge could just access all the info he needed in a console in The Next Generation, is because the Federation ponied up for our new Adapter (this got a lot of laughs - even though nobody raised their hand when he asked who was a Star Trek fan a minute earlier). He described the increasing prevalence of REST, the challenges of working with "REST-ish" implementations, and how Sagamore can easily work with Progress products. If there's one thing to remember, he said, it's that "we turn SQL into REST," which is pretty cool.

And that's it for the keynotes and breakouts on day one! Next attendees will enjoy a reception and dinner. We'll return here tomorrow for more coverage of all the action on day two!