OpenEdge, the open Force?

Use the "Force" Luke...Ok, now that's out of the way, because admit it, that's the first thing that entered your head when you saw the title. That Force is not the Force I'm looking for....OK, enough!

No, The Force I'm referring to is force.com, the platform provided by the folks over at Salesforce as a means of building Force applications. Let's be honest here, if you ask most people to name a major player in the SaaS application space today, most people would say Salesforce.com, and as such their platform upon which it's built, force.com, is held in high regard. But here's where is gets interesting.  I was reading a whitepaper the other day where I came across some figures :

• Overall Project Cost is 30% less
• Requirement definition is 25% less
• Testing Effort is 10% less

These figures come courtesy of Galorath Inc. a research company that conducted a study into developing with force.com versus traditional development.  This got me thinking.

Back in February, Nancy posted a blog entry about the new Forrester report into the Total Economic Impact of the OpenEdge Platform.  When you look at the outcome of this report there are some striking conclusions :

• Developing with OpenEdge is 40% more  productive than alternative platforms
• Application Delivery with OpenEdge is 30% faster to market than when using an alternative platform
• Support staff productivity gain is 80% with OpenEdge as compared to alternative platforms

Interesting, no?  So when you compare OpenEdge to what is in most people's minds the 800lb gorilla in the SaaS world and a thoroughly modern platform, not only do you get a more than favorable comparison, you are actually better positioned.  Why?  Well what's the one big thing Force.com doesn't allow you to do? Deploy outside of Force! Whereas with OpenEdge you have the freedom to deploy pretty much anywhere, be that on premise, a traditional hosting model or indeed in the Cloud.

So good readers, I put it to you that OpenEdge is not only the open equivalent of something such as force.com, but indeed is the leading platform for developing modern SaaS applications where you get to decide how to best deploy it based upon your business model.