Jan 30, 2020
I'm (Ken Walsh) part of Constellation Financing Systems. Constellation Financing Systems is part of Constellation Software. Constellation Software is Canada's largest software company by market cap, about $28 billion.
Back in 2006 when Constellation purchased us, they purchased our lease/loan management solution. That solution has been in the industry now about 30 years, and the entire time we've been a Progress partner. Now I've recently pushed out Progress 12.1.
We started our modernization project because basically the industry had been obviously changing over many years. What we found ourselves then is we have a very robust and feature-rich product that is a Windows 32 client, so you can't compete anymore. No one wants to use terminal servers or Citrix boxes anymore. What we decided to do is start making a web-enabled product. We engaged Progress Professional Services to help us design that new UX, along with giving us guidelines as best practices when designing new screens.
ProgressNEXT 2018, we heard about all the new stuff coming out with Progress 12 and got very excited—server-side joins, multi-threaded database, new development tools. Coming up to ProgressNEXT, we've been working on our modernization project for about a year now. We realized if we want to keep moving forward and go to OpenEdge 12, we had to dive in and start learning about Progress application server.
The features of OpenEdge I was looking forward to getting into most for OpenEdge 12 is less about a feature and more about ability. Although there's many new features, what they all culminate to is your ability now to scale. Where the improvement really came in is when you did multi-threading scaling examples, where now I've moved my database to being a database server and moving all my PAS instances off server, which basically means now I can scale up multiple servers all around my database and now I'm seeing incredible performance.
The last thing that really has made my life a lot easier with OpenEdge PASOE is the IT side. Now, when I've implemented my web servers and I'm sitting outside my firewall, I'm asking for UDP ports, TCP ports, NetBEUI all to be opened just so that a web service can talk to my application servers. But now with PASOE, I open one port per environment, so I've gone from opening possibly 600 ports to three.
The real takeaway from everything I've seen has been now your ability to truly scale. I'm really excited to see how that's going to work in our production environments, to see how we can better scale to our larger customers.