The second morning keynote was by John Goodson, SVP of products, digging a bit more deeply into the technology and products behind responsive business management (Control Tower, Savvion, Apama, Actional, Visual Analytics) and responsive business integration (Actional, DataXtend, DataDirect, Sonic). This is a formidable suite of products, and there are 20 more in their portfolio that he didn’t even cover; some degree of integration between these is really required to make this a bit less unwieldy.
He showed a (canned) demo of Progress RPM and Control Tower, including event and process monitoring as well as process modeling directly in the same environment. He stressed that Control Tower is not just about visibility, it’s about being able to make changes in real time.
He quoted Mike Gualtieri of Forrester, who said “Java is a dead-end for enterprise application development” earlier this year; Goodson pointed out that Java coding is not inherently agile enough for a truly responsive business as he announced OpenEdge 11: fully integrated with BPM, multi-tenanted and deployable in the cloud, with support for iPad and Silverlight. It appears that OpenEdge is now positioned as part of RPM, with OpenEdge BPM being positioned as “the world’s first business process-enabled application development platform”. Furthermore, it’s deployable in the cloud on their Arcade platform.
John Bates returned to the stage – complete in a British red coat and tricorner hat last seen in Boston around 1776 – to discuss the industry solution accelerators available for RPM: capital markets, telecom and more. These accelerators allow developers to quickly assemble applications that combine RPM capabilities and their own industry knowledge. Interestingly, Savvion refocused on solution accelerators a year or more before their acquisition by Progress, and these are now considered by the analysts to be a requires feature in a BPMS.
He finished with a recorded demo of a detecting wash trades in the market, based on the capital markets solution accelerator, including discovering alerts, analyzing the related data, and setting up custom event correlation on the fly.