Looking Back at #PRGS14

Hard to believe it’s been over a week since Progress Exchange! With over 10 hands-on workshops, more than 40 technical sessions, four technical tracks and countless networking opportunities, our annual customer and partner conference couldn’t have gone any better.

The reaction from Progress DataDirect customers was particularly enthusiastic. People seemed to enjoy the keynote from Michael Benedict, president of the Data Connectivity and Integration Business Unit. During his session, Michael discussed how data is the new oil. It’s a huge asset for optimizing your applications, and monetizing your business strategy.

Other feedback we heard from attendees include that EDI is still alive and kicking! There was lots of interest in the DataDirect EDI Converters to change EDI into something that actually makes sense.

Partners and ISVs also loved hearing more about analytics. In fact, the first question in the Easyl session started with “This is the most brilliant session I’ve seen so far.” We love hearing that! Every modern app requires built in reporting and analytics – for our OpenEdge customers the combination of Easyl and DataPA is like a slam-dunk to solve their issues.

We were excited that attendees were chatting about the ABL to ODBC project, included in newer versions of Progress Developer Studio, to treat all the new data sources DataDirect offers as native ABL, including Google Analytics, Salesforce and MongoDB. SQL access to the OpenEdge application server using OpenAccess also hit home for both partners and end users who stopped by our booth and were struggling with exposing and warehousing data and developing complex calculations to simulate business logic.

Overall, Progress Exchange helped get the DataDirect message out to the OpenEdge community. Our customers now understand how they can get on forefront of next gen connectivity via DataDirect Cloud or connect to private OpenEdge clouds over https for Intel. We also recently introduced easy firewall friendly OData production from OpenEdge.

Did you attend Progress Exchange? Share your feedback at @DataDirect_News!