Obrigado

If you have been following this blog lately you can see there has been a lot of focus on customer-facing engagements including Exchange Online, the UK PUG, and Australia Exchange.  I just returned from the Brazil Exchange event, I’ll tell you about that in a minute, and you’ll hear about other events in upcoming posts about other customer facing events over the next few days.

So do we do it?  Why so many events?  Well we think we have an exciting and compelling strategy with OpenEdge 10.2B being released in a few weeks, work starting on OpenEdge 11, and a lot of focus on SaaS and Cloud.  But we also want to hear from you.  So speak up and be counted.  Make sure your account team knows about your issues  and concerns, go to a local PUG event or other regional event, and tell the Progress representative what you think, or head over to Progress Communities, and lay out your thoughts in one of our forums.

But now onto Brazil. Brazil Exchange, held in Sao Paulo on Oct. 21, was another extremely successful event with over 525 attendees.  The general session was very much focused on Operational Responsiveness and how the entire Progress portfolio of products can help you achieve Operational Responsiveness. As part of the General Session, Rick Kuzyk put together a very exciting demo showing OpenEdge, Apama, Sonic, and Actional all working together to provide real-time visibility in an automobile manufacturing yard complete with a mashup using Google maps, and showed the dashboard running on an iPhone.  Very slick!!

And there were 15 different breakout sessions covering OpenEdge, Actional, and Apama, and while they were “all Portuguese to me” (literally - except for mine and Rick’s), there was lots of interest in the key capabilities that we are providing including OpenEdge GUI for .NET (sold out crowd) , OpenEdge support for Actional, OpenEdge Management, and RIA.

Excellent job by the Brazilian team, and I would like to thank all of our Brazilian customers for attending this event.

And don’t forget, there is a great collection of presentations still available on the Exchange Online site, so check it out because it all goes away on December 17!

Ken