#PRGS14 Shows Progress' Commitment to Partners

We were sad to say goodbye to this year's Progress Exchange conference, held in Orlando from October 6-8. Between our Partner+ Business Forum and the conference itself, there was so much to learn and take away - where do I start?

The penetrating theme throughout the conference was one of modernization and innovation focused around building applications for the future. Progress executives including Phil Pead, Karen Tegan Padir, Jerry Rulli, Michael Benedict and John Goodson each spoke of ways to take existing applications and modernize them using Progress technology such as Rollbase, OpenEdge, DataDirect, Modulus and Corticon to stay ahead of competitors and remain relevant. They emphasized Progress' commitment to helping partners and customers compete in the disruptive technology market by focusing on trends like mobility and data.

In my last blog, I wrapped up Exchange Day 2, describing the happenings of the first 2 days, including Phil Pead, Karen Padir, Jerry Rulli, and Michael Benedict's keynote presentations.

Day 3 of Progress Exchange held a keynote from our CTO and CPO, John Goodson, who spoke about where Progress is moving, what the plans are for the future of Progress technology and where we'll be investing in our technology so our partners can continue to innovate and modernize their applications to compete in the market. He mentioned four key areas where Progress will align development efforts: 1) user experience, 2) mobility, 3) data, 4) productivity.

Progress CTO & CPO, John Goodson explains Progress' goal of moving partners and customers forward to modernize applications and innovate in their respective markets.

During his talk, Goodson also sat down with our partner Akioma to discuss how they are using a combination of Progress technologies including Progress Rollbase, OpenEdge, Corticon and Node.js to build modern applications.

Mike Liewehr of Akioma speaks to John Goodson about how his company is using a combination of Progress technologies to develop modern apps.

He even brought our VP, UX, Arin Bhowmick up on stage to demo project "Sparkle" - a new UX design for Progress Pacific, coming soon to Progress users, which the audience seemed really excited about!

Progress VP, UX, Arin Bhowmick demos project Sparkle, the new face of Pacific.

We also got to hear from our guest speaker Kerry Bailey, SVP of HP Cloud at Hewlett-Packard, who spoke about cloud strategy and where cloud is going, citing that the future for most enterprises will be focused around a hybrid model mixed between on-premise applications and cloud-hosted applications. He noted "every customer is on the hybrid cloud journey" and shared the idea that the future of cloud investment is going to fall in the hands of the line-of-business executives.

Kerry Bailey, SVP, HP Cloud at Hewlett-Packard.

In addition to the keynotes, we announced news of our Pacific App Server for OpenEdge and shared the story of how our EMEA partner GMT is used Progress OpenEdge to create an IoT application to improve efficiency in waste management.  The day was packed with unique sessions around everything from the new table partitioning capabilities of OpenEdge 11.4 to a demo of the new Pacific App Server for OpenEdge to customizing your apps and mastering Rollbase.

I should not forget to mention that we announced the winners of our Spark Selfie Scavenger Hunt! Check out the winning selfies:

Dean Bailes, Director at Red Group Solutions

• Spark a selfie with a Progress pillow

David Barach, CEO at Good Done Great

• Spark a selfie with a Progress employee

Torstein Roenaas, Director, Sales & Marketing at Consolidate

• Spark a selfie with something orange

The biggest takeaway from Exchange 2014? Progress is going to stick by its partners and customers and provide the technology, guidance and support they need to  transform their businesses and innovate in their markets. Progress will help partners continually modernize their applications for a contemporary user experience. Get ready world - Progress users are ready to take on whatever the future of technology holds!

Thanks again to everyone who came from across the world to attend Progress Exchange 2014! We learned a ton from you about what you want to see in our technology, loved hearing your success stories and had a blast getting together with you all! We hope you also learned a lot from us, and we can't wait to see you all at the next Exchange conference. Cheers!

For another great recap of Exchange 2014, see the Saugatuck Technology blog for analyst, Mike West's take on the conference. Or to see the real-time Exchange excitement, take a look at our hashtag #PRGS14 - which is still sparking post-conference conversation!