Leveling the playing field

I recently had the opportunity to visit the AWS Summit event in Berlin, Germany. Apart from being completely sold out, the one thing that immediately struck me was the sheer number of developers attending. Several of the “testimonials” at the event were small start-ups who had an idea (or a Spark if you like) and were looking for a way to bring that idea to market with essentially zero Capex. In our Digital Society, all future business models are inherently volatile and the Cloud is a great way to minimize Capex (and move it to Opex) and remove some of the risk for budding ISV’s looking to bring innovative solutions to market. The Cloud economy with its “pay-as-you-grow” capability is an ideal underpinning for evolving software solutions as they expand in capability and reach (or not!). By lowering the barrier to entry, smaller innovative developers can now play with the big boys and leverage their speed and mobility to bring new and innovative solutions to market at a brisk pace.

The Progress Pacific platform as a service (PaaS) – and in particular the Progress Rollbase rapid application development platform – layers perfectly onto the “start-small-and-grow-with-demand” economics of an IaaS such as EC2 from AWS or virtually any other IaaS you may prefer. Progress Rollbase is inherently cloud-enabled and supports a strong model-driven paradigm  for developers looking to build “the next big thing”. It also comes with a catalog of templates to kick-start development initiatives if you want to build on something that is cool but not quite what you were looking for…. Apart from supporting a model-driven development paradigm, Progress Rollbase resonates with ISVs because applications can be easily extended by standards-based JavaScript. ISVs can now access a much larger pool of developer skills and more easily differentiate their solutions.

Add unified, cloud-based access to a plethora of data sources into the mix (from Salesforce to Hadoop) with DataDirect Cloud, and you’ve got a great platform for building adaptive solutions for business. Progress Pacific brings these powerful technologies together in a PaaS – ISVs, go innovate!