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A Musical Technology Experience!

The General Session was hosted by David Olson, Director Enterprise Solutions, Progress Software, who began by inviting everyone to "Get In On It" while the sounds of music filled the air. He explained, "If you think about it, composing and performing music is a lot like application development. You make up a tune, form it into something that's playable and come up with ways to perform it."

Conducting an on-stage band to demonstrate, Olson cued the guitars ("a little MRP funk"), the keyboards ("some HR on the Hammond B-3), drums and horns (a little classic Batch processing) to put it all together. An audience of developers, partners, and executives were hooked as they were likened to composers, instruments, conductors and performers. "That's what you all do. You bring all that together to make some very interesting, and by what we can see, very popular music. So today, we're going to use music as a metaphor to show you what we can do. It's all there ready for you to take your tunes and make the music."

For an update on Progress and a perspective on the future, Co-Founder and CEO Joe Alsop spoke about the state of the company, successes throughout the past year, technology trends of the past 25 years (Progress celebrated its 25th anniversary in December 2006) and then identified three trends—SOA, SaaS and Event Processing that Progress is focused on.

The session continued with live product demos featuring Sonic ESB, Apama and OpenEdge. Olson explained, "We're going to let the products do the talking—wait, strike that—we're going to let the products make the music." The hardware in the room included several computers and broker servers on stage, a router and four servers attached to keyboards (synthesizers) positioned at four points around the ballroom to enhance the musical/technology experience.

The demos used MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) to represent XML messages. "You see, MIDI is a lot like XML—MIDI messages are sent to devices such as synthesizers and lighting controllers, and the data tells the device what to do—play a note; change an instrument; crank up the volume. And, in the business world this XML message might tell the service to check the credit, add an employee to payroll and order more stock, " says Olson.

KEY MESSAGES

A key message implicit in the demos was the event-oriented nature of business and the support which products like Sonic, Apama and OpenEdge now provide. Historically, data has been stored within applications, safeguarding the information until others pull it out with extract, transform and load applications or using reporting tools to bring it to management attention. What Progress is showing now is that enterprises can move easily to an event-driven paradigm with confidence. Products like Sonic ESB provide a cost effective and reliable event-backbone which can stretch across WAN boundaries and reliably bring distributed enterprises together as if running from a single machine room. Progress Apama provides the event correlation and complex logic for turning these events into business activities. And, OpenEdge provides the development tools for building the new core application services that today’s corporation needs to be competitive.

SONIC ESB DEMO

Jaime Meritt, Director of ESB Strategy and Technology, demonstrated new capabilities of Sonic ESB 7.5, including Sonic BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) Server’s addition of standards-based service orchestration to Sonic ESB intelligent routing, integrating Actional for SOA Management across and beyond the ESB and integrating DataXtend SI for common data model management.

The demo started using the Sonic IDE (an Eclipse based developer's workbench) to show how services distributed throughout the network can be easily orchestrated into clear and ear-pleasing tunes. By first sending a MIDI file with a single note and then a series of MIDI files (based on an Olson-composed tune) to the various servers stationed throughout the room, Meritt demonstrated the Sonic ESB IDE's ease of development, followed by distributed and flexible deployment, standards (BPEL) based orchestration and finally, in a risky and thoroughly convincing move, continuous availability by having Olson shut down one of the broker servers. True to Sonic's Continuous Availability Architecture, the music played on—never missing a note!

Looking more closely at the Sonic BPEL Server component of the demo, Meritt first explained BPEL as standards based and a visual language used to orchestrate services in long running processes. The business example used was "loan aggregation" (think of LendingTree.com and "When banks compete you win") where loan applications are sent concurrently to four banks to find the best interest rate. Once all four banks reply the loan application process continues. In the demo, Merrit used BPEL to orchestrate four sets of musical notes (representing four bank services). The process begins with the "tap-tap" of the conductor's baton (the loan applications being sent out), followed by each server playing its notes (each bank providing its interest rate), and finally playing applause when all music has played at each server (all banks replying with interest rates).

APAMA DEMO

In the Apama demo, Mark Palmer, Vice President and General Manager of the Apama Division, used a musical animation and some classic Beatles tunes to demonstrate how Apama enables users to monitor, analyze and act on event patterns and correlations.

Palmer also used an algorithmic trading and regulatory monitoring application to demonstrate Apama's complex event processing (CEP) and real-time analytics capabilities. By monitoring and correlating trades with news releases, Apama's technology will enable a large European financial regulatory agency to automatically suspend trading when unusual patterns of increased trading activity appear prior to any press announcements related to that ticker symbol. During the demo, Palmer showed how easy it is to build a set of monitoring rules using the Apama Scenario Builder and then deploy those new rules into production.

The session ended with a video of long time Progress partner Manuvis, who has added Apama BAM capabilities to its OpenEdge and Sonic-based manufacturing resource management application. The Apama complex event processing capabilities have been integrated into Manuvis' Factory MRI platform enabling manufacturers to get an up-to-the-second understanding of the state of every process on their shop floors. This video highlighted how Premier Manufacturing, a Manuvis customer, has already benefited from the OpenEdge and Sonic-based application, and the expected benefits of the additional Apama capabilities that provide a much needed competitive edge against growing global competition.

OPENEDGE DEMO

Mike Fabrico, Vice President of IT at Broder Bros., Co., a wholesale distributor of imprintable sportswear and accessories in the United States with revenues approaching $1 billion opened with a short presentation. He described how the use of OpenEdge-based applications from Progress partners FDM4 and IRMS along with Progress EasyAsk, allowed Broder to nearly double in size over the past few years—with minimal additional IT staff. Fabrico specifically noted that he manages a dozen ERP databases with only one DBA.

Saving the best for last, Anthony Swindells, Progress Fellow, extolled the virtues of turning all this technology into money-making application development. Swindells reminded the audience of recent OpenEdge 10 enhancement s such as supporting very large databases ("do you know what a quintillion is?") and OpenEdge Architect, an Eclipse-based IDE for easy application development.

Swindells then wowed the crowd with a preview of OpenEdge Advanced GUI by using new drag and drop tools to build a music catalog, "pTunes," and then creating and launching a music player. To demonstrate OpenEdge capabilities to develop and deploy SOA services and easily integrate with Sonic ESB, Swindells distributed the "pTunes" music (as MIDI files) to the various Sonic-based player services throughout the room, somehow including the Chicken Dance in all this.