The Future is Bright with OpenEdge
Progress® Software recently hosted its OpenEdge® World Tour across the globe. Australia was a key market with three cities visited: Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. In every city, we met with customers, partners, developers and technology leaders who shared how they are using the OpenEdge platform to develop, run and evolve on-premises or cloud applications that demand reliability, security and long-term trust.
Across Australia, mission-critical OpenEdge-powered applications are the backbone of key industries every day—from ERP systems running complex food processing plants, coordinating production and fleets delivering to hundreds of restaurants, to online booking platforms enabling over 25 million passenger journeys annually across rail, bus and other transport networks. The OpenEdge platform underpins operations where reliability is non-negotiable and powers a diverse, live ecosystem of applications that keep the country moving.
Building on this strong foundation, organizations are now embracing OpenEdge 12.8 and 13 to accelerate innovation and modernize the next generation of digital solutions.
Modernization Is About Business Outcomes—Not Platform Change
For Australian organizations running on the OpenEdge platform, modernization is not a technology exercise—it is a business requirement.
All these systems relying on OpenEdge capabilities already work: they run production lines, manage logistics networks and power daily operations. The challenge is not replacing them—it is helping them continue to deliver value as the business evolves.
Today, organizations are facing increasing pressure to:
- Integrate with modern ecosystems and partner networks
- Make faster, data-driven decisions
- Meet rising security and compliance expectations
- Support new digital experiences for customers and employees
The risk lies in standing still, rather than moving forward. When organizations delay modernization, they begin to feel the impact in very real ways: slower innovation cycles, rising operational overhead and increased difficulty connecting their core systems to the rest of the business.
Modernization is about enabling the business to move forward without disrupting what already works.
With the latest OpenEdge 12.8 and 13, organizations can take a phased, controlled approach to modernization—improving architecture, performance and integration all while keeping core applications stable and running. That means:
- Applications continue to operate without interruption
- Teams can modernize incrementally, not all at once
- Business operations remain stable throughout the process
Ultimately, modernization is about giving businesses the flexibility to adapt so they can scale, innovate and compete without putting their core operations at risk.
Future-Proofing Your Business for the 2030s
The OpenEdge platform has evolved alongside organizations’ needs for over 45 years. Today, it continues to be at the forefront of what customers, partners and the developer community will need to thrive in the next decade.
With OpenEdge 11.7 now retired, Progress Software has released OpenEdge 12.8 and OpenEdge 13.
Why should you transition?
Modernizing isn’t just about moving to a newer version—it’s about unlocking the full range of OpenEdge capabilities available for support across stability, innovation, AI and data.
The new OpenEdge platform offers many key features that empower organizations and developers to move forward with confidence, without disrupting the systems that already run their business:
| OpenEdge 12.8(Current LTS) | OpenEdge 13.0(Current Innovation Release) |
|---|---|
| Best For:
Organizations prioritizing long-term stability, compliance and support | Best For:
Organizations ready to modernize and prepare for the next LTS |
|
|
OpenEdge 12.8 and 13 set the stage for success with continuous innovation, secure modernization, deep technical enhancements and a focus on customer outcomes.
Unlocking Your AI Potential with the OpenEdge Platform
The OpenEdge platform is unlocking AI-powered outcomes by making data, development workflows and human-readable ABL language AI-ready. It turns data into decisions, accelerates modernization and boosts developer productivity.
Progress Software has introduced three key AI solutions that interact with the OpenEdge Platform:
- Progress OpenEdge AI Assistant (formerly MCP Connector for ABL) – This tool is specifically built to fuel modern AI-powered workflows for OpenEdge development. This plays an important role in AI-assisted development workflows. It delivers domain-specific accuracy, context-aware coding support and modernization capabilities that generic models cannot provide.
- Progress Agentic RAG - This is an end-to-end RAG platform that helps transform enterprise data into accurate, actionable answers. It bridges the OpenEdge data gap by combining your structured records with unstructured knowledge to deliver traceable, high‑quality answers and AI‑powered workflows without rewriting your apps.
- OpenEdge MCP Server - This solution helps you securely connect OpenEdge apps to AI assistants, enabling modern AI integration without rewriting code.
Together, these solutions enable you to unlock trusted, explainable, end‑to‑end AI workflows that modernize applications without rewriting them. And by bringing AI-driven intelligence to your Progress OpenEdge applications, you can transform mission-critical data into smarter decisions and measurable value.
The OpenEdge platform has been built for businesses but designed for developers. In the AI era, OpenEdge tools are helping developers be more productive and innovative. From modern IDEs, tooling and AI‑assisted development to visibility into code quality, we are here to make developers’ lives easier and foster a strong OpenEdge community that they can rely on.
Furthermore, Progress Software offers a wide range of continuous learning opportunities to equip developers with everything they need to thrive:
- Free OpenEdge Developer Certification
- The Progress Academy, with instructor-led and on-demand training available in person
- Our LinkedIn Talent Group, with +5,000 members
- A Progress Labs Discord Server
- An Internship Program
- And much more…
What We Heard from Customers and Partners
Many organizations and developers are already reaping the benefits of OpenEdge 12.8 and OpenEdge 13.
Here three examples that received a lot of attention during the conference.
Platform Modernization: from Complexity to Control
A financial services organization shared how it dramatically improved the performance, stability, and security of its large OpenEdge-based mortgage processing platform by simplifying years of accumulated architectural complexity. Upgrading to OpenEdge 12.8 with PASOE, this OpenEdge user was able to simplify its multi-tier architecture, strengthen its data security and compliance posture, standardize operational automation at scale, reduce runtime and operational overhead and improve supportability and system transparency.
- Simplifying architecture, delivering greater benefits than hardware upgrades or performance tuning
- Reduced end-of-month processing was reduced from 7–10 hours to around 10 minutes and daily recovery operations from 40 minutes to under 7 minutes
- Strengthened security through data masking, encryption and improved key management practices
- Removed more than 1,500 obsolete scripts, improving maintainability and governance
This project demonstrates that modernization often delivers the greatest value when focused on reducing complexity, enforcing standards and aligning with platform best practices.
AI-Powered Modernization for OpenEdge Applications
Consultingwerk, which has been helping organizations with migrations for many years, has recently used OpenEdge AI Coding Assistants to accelerate development and refactoring for some of its clients. Using AI tooling, they were able to apply modern patterns, APIs and architecture, separate UI from business logic, separate domain logic from application logic and eliminate duplicate logic that had spread across their customers’ codebase.
Key takeaways:
- AI can significantly reduce the time required to analyze, document and refactor large OpenEdge applications.
- Modern AI models can now better understand ABL/OpenEdge codebases more effectively
- Human oversight remains essential to validate outputs and guide key decisions
- Standards like MCP improve accuracy, governance and reliability in AI-led modernization
“OpenEdge is great at empowering developers with AI, while still keeping humans in the loop. That’s what makes it a great platform, addressing both sides of the AI-human equation,” said Mike Fechner, Director at Consultingwerk.
Modernizing for Scale, Agility and AI
A leading pension administration and asset servicing provider shared its OpenEdge journey, evolving from a client-server architecture to a scalable, multi-tier, multi-tenant platform using PASOE, APIs, containerization and DevSecOps. The initiative helped support higher transaction volumes, regulatory demands, real-time digital services and multiple schemes from a common platform—all while reducing operational costs and maintaining reliability and compliance.
Key takeaways:
- Modernization was driven by the need for scalability, multi-tenancy, API integration and faster service delivery
- The platform evolved from a client-server model to a multi-tier, API-enabled, containerized architecture
- Technology modernization delivered operational efficiencies, lower costs, and faster rollout of new services and schemes
- The next phase focuses on AI-assisted development, policy-driven automation, embedded knowledge systems and human oversight of AI decisions
The session concluded with an important reminder: Platform architecture and configuration should absorb complexity, enabling growth without a proportional increase in operational risk.
Three Steps to Get Started Today
- Assess your modernization journey, identify what’s holding you back and evaluate the technology and business opportunities you can unlock by migrating to the new OpenEdge Platform.
- Engage with our Progress Software teams and the network of Australian partners to plan a phased approach that will take you from POC to rollout. The Progress professional services team has deep expertise and can provide a tailored approach.
- Explore the numerous OpenEdge World Tour follow-up resources, including recordings, presentations, upcoming sessions, contact details and more here: [https://www.progress.com/campaigns/openedge/openedge-news-you-can-use]
