Progress Software announced the availability of new data connectivity and application capabilities as part of its Progress Pacific application platform-as-a-service (aPaaS).
“Pacific is a platform running in the cloud that is targeted at small and medium-size businesses, ISVs and departmental IT,” John Goodson, Chief Product Officer at Progress Software, explained in an interview. “Instead of having an expensive, highly trained IT staff to build applications we provide a visual design paradigm that lets business owners and others who are not as skilled, build powerful applications that can connect to any data sources and do that very quickly.”
The new capabilities being rolled out include data connectivity with the new Progress DataDirect Cloud service that enables applications to easily integrate data from popular SaaS, relational database, Big Data, social, CRM and ERP systems. The connection management service allows applications to be built in less time by using a single standards-based interface to execute SQL queries against a wide range of cloud data sources.
“This is a great time in data right now because things are expanding. It is not just relational data anymore,” says Goodson. “People want to get to SaaS data sources like Salesforce, and Microsoft Dynamics, and Oracle. They also want to get to NoSQL, and NewSQL databases. They have outgrown their data warehouses and they are trying to figure out which Hadoop system to use - and we support connectivity to that as well. DataDirect Cloud is the first step to this service-based offering which is a single point for applications to connect to all of these data sources in a single consistent way.”
In addition, as part of new capabilities with Progress Pacific, application development is enabled with new integrated business process management (BPM) and business rules management system (BRMS) capabilities that simplify application customization using Progress OpenEdge 11.3 development software. Flexible processes, rules and workflows can be easily configured to meet business requirements.
In addition, an improved Progress Rollbase infrastructure ensures an enhanced user experience for standards-based business applications created with innovative drag-and-drop tools using any web browser. Rollbase was recently acquired by Progress and provides a key component that Progress is leveraging for the Pacific platform – a browser-based visual application development component. Rollbase is combined with DataDirect Cloud, the initial service-based offering in the cloud to support connectivity to multiple data sources, explains Goodson.
“What most companies are probably doing is taking their on-premise products and making them available in the cloud and calling that a cloud offering. We didn’t do that. What we did instead is we re-architected our products from the last year and fit use cases that we thought were more applicable to the cloud,” contends Goodson. “Seventy-five percent of our customers probably will never make it to a public cloud and they are content running in a private cloud. And, for those customers, assets like BPM and business rules are very important to their applications for modernization. Those are two key features we have made available.”
More information about Progress Software can be obtained at www.progress.com.