Proginov Expands Its ERP Business, Embracing the Latest Features of Progress OpenEdge
Industries:
Technology & SoftwareChallenge
Since its founding in 1996, ERP solutions provider Proginov has relied on the Progress OpenEdge mission-critical application development platform.Solution
Continuously evolve and modernize its underlying OpenEdge infrastructure and keep pace with the latest version of OpenEdge.Result
Serving more than 1,300 customers with 15,000 production databases and successfully managing a total of 27,500 databases (production and test environments) with a staff of ten, including several DBAs.Full Story
Challenge
Serving primarily small-to-medium sized enterprises across multiple industries, Proginov’s ERP solutions must be flexible and adaptable to the ever-changing, wide ranging needs of its customers in industries that include distribution, construction, transportation, health care and more. Since its founding, Proginov developed the reputation as an innovator, hosting the first French ERP in SaaS in 2001 and creating a web services portal in 2007. It first chose Progress® OpenEdge® in 1996 for its flexibility.
“When we were first getting started we wanted a solution that could run Windows, Unix and AS400 on the same database,” said Patrice Perrot, DBA, Proginov. “OpenEdge was one of the first solutions with that capability.”
And today, adding about 40 new customers each year, Proginov continues to look to OpenEdge for its flexibility, scalability and reliability.
The OpenEdge databases are robust, ready and strong with very few issues and are very easy to work with. For us there are performance advantages we are seeing with OpenEdge 12 especially on the server side. For example, we have reduced the time to process some queries by almost 50 percent, from ten seconds down to about four or five seconds.
Patrice Perrot
DBA at Proginov
Solution
From its inception, Proginov focused on ERP solutions. Its application suite is based around commercial and industrial management, accounting and finance, payroll and HR. With each new release Proginov enhances its ERP system with additional modules and applications to meet the requirements of the business sectors it serves. Today, the company offers nearly 20 business solutions under its ERP umbrella. As the business grew Proginov continuously modernized and evolved its foundational OpenEdge infrastructure. Today, the company runs the latest version, taking advantage of its enhanced features and performance.
“For us there are performance advantages we are seeing with OpenEdge 12 especially on the server side,” said Patrice Perrot. “For example, we have reduced the time to process some queries by almost 50 percent, from ten seconds down to about four or five seconds.”
Result
Today, approaching it’s 30th year in business and 30 years building out its solutions on the Progress OpenEdge application development platform, Proginov’s 1,300+ customers enjoy state-of-the-art ERP solutions across various cloud and self-hosted environments. With more than 15,000 production databases hosted in its own cloud, performance is always top of mind.
“If we can save just one or two percent when it comes to performance, it is very important to customers, as well as to us because of the resulting cost savings,” Patrice Perrot said. “For example, we use the Memory Profiler which really helps us to optimize memory, improving performance and saving money.”
When it comes to internal efficiencies, OpenEdge delivers for Proginov.
“We have about 27,500 databases between our production and test environments,” Patrice Perrot said. “We have ten people managing those databases including several database administrators. The OpenEdge databases are robust, ready and strong with very few issues and are very easy to work with.”
As far as support and technical resources, Proginov reports that Progress has always been by its side.
“If we have questions or issues we simply call tech support or send a message to the MDBA (Managed Database Administration) team and they come back to us quickly and with good answers to our questions,” Patrice Perrot said. “The OpenEdge community is also very strong and when we put questions out to the community, there is always a solution with Progress.”
Proginov has also looked to the Progress product portfolio to meet unique customer requirements. For example, one customer needed a secure file transfer solution and Proginov turned to Progress® MOVEit® Managed File Transfer.
“There is a local port that we have to send files with every invoice,” Fabrice Mabit, System Development Team Manager, Proginov explained. “We implemented MOVEit—it had the security features we needed and it is very easy to use.”
Keeping pace with technology, Proginov always has its sights set on the future—and today that includes AI.
“We are doing our research on AI and plan to add some generative AI features in 2025,” Fabrice Mabit said. “Performance is always a top priority so we are always looking for ways to optimize performance. And right now we are looking forward to the availability of Visual Studio Code as another ABL coding option.”
Progress OpenEdge is a multi-platform application development environment. Hence, moving from one operating system to another did not require ABL coding changes for us. It also enabled us to set a path forward to cloud migration. We did come across a few migration challenges but they are unrelated to OpenEdge. The migration also helped us to gain tangible operational benefits, like cost savings on hardware infrastructure, easier to maintain updates and most importantly higher (or similar) performance/stability of the migrated platform.
Fabrice Mabit
System Development Team Manager at Proginov