Rob Levy, Progress’ SVP and chief product officer (formerly of BEA), discussed more of the product strategy. Progress is really trying to bring the Wayne Gretzsky approach (“skate to where the puck is going, not to where it has been”) to their customers’ business: don’t focus on what is happening now, but on what will happen. This could mean anticipating problematic events and changing their course before they manifest in a problem, or anticipating a customer’s needs and upselling them based on their current products and purchasing trajectory.
Delivering this sort of operational responsiveness includes responsive process management, responsive information management and responsive business applications. Looking at the Progress suite of products, process management may include Actional, Apama and Savvion; information management may include DataDirect Connect, Enterprise Data Services and DataDirect Shadow; and business applications may include ObjectStore, OpenEdge and Orbix. Levy makes the strong tie between information management and process management, which is often ignored in BPM: you can’t manage your processes without also managing, or at least understanding, your data. He also emphasized the need to have cloud-based, scalable, multi-tenant solutions for certain types of applications.
This was pretty high level, but Levy has only been at Progress for a couple of months; he ended up by introducing John Bates, the CTO, for more detail.