Constellation Financial Software Evolves Its Business with the OpenEdge 12 Platform

As a premier software and service provider of CRM, origination, credit, document management, lease and loan management software, Constellation Financial Software wanted to meet the needs of its clients by evolving its solution from a Win32 client-server application to a web-based app. They called this Project Infinity.

However, as a Win32 shop, Constellation Financial Software wanted outside expertise to ensure Infinity ASSET would have the features, speed, performance and security that their clients would demand of a web-based application. For that, they engaged Progress Services.

With the help of Progress Services and evolving from OpenEdge 11 to OpenEdge 12.1, Constellation Financial Software was able to successfully bring Project Infinity to a conclusion with the launch of the modernized, web-based solution.

ASSET was a client-server application in a world of web-based applications and Constellation Financial Software knew the application needed to evolve. Constellation Financial Software chose ASP.NET MVC as the new design platform for Infinity ASSET and Progress® Telerik® UI for ASP.NET MVC as its toolkit, with 70+ lightweight extensions powered by Kendo UI®. Constellation Financial Software was planning to do all the work on OpenEdge 11 with an existing .NET API through Proxygen.

Constellation Financial Software’s first step was to engage Progress Services to review Project Infinity and provide recommendations. Progress Services’ first recommendation was to provide UI mock-ups to existing customers for their review and comment. Constellation Financial Software shared the initial designs with its largest client and user groups, and produced multiple iterations based on that real-world feedback. Progress Services provided information and advice on UI design best practices.

With the UI settled, Constellation Financial Software next looked at how to incorporate performance and scalability improvements. Progress Services recommended an upgrade from OpenEdge 11 to OpenEdge 12.1. Progress consultants noted that of particular value to Constellation Financial Software would be the multi- threaded OpenEdge Database Server, and its ability to process remote client requests concurrently, significantly improving database performance under load without requiring application coding changes. With the multi- threaded database, Constellation Financial Software maximizes CPUs on the database server and the remote server.

The first step in achieving a modern, evolved application architecture that supports the organization as users and business demands shift and change, is to modernize to Progress Application Server (PAS) for OpenEdge. It is a scalable and cloud-ready server that optimizes operations and unifies all of the Progress products into a single powerful platform streamlining system management, with a scalable architecture, a simplified implementation, enhanced analysis tools and faster throughput and performance.

After one year of planning, design, development and testing, Project Infinity is complete, and the application is live. Feedback on the multi-threaded environment has been overwhelmingly positive, with data loading three times faster with PAS for OpenEdge than with the single- threaded Win32 application.

“Our customers are very happy with the scalability they’re seeing in their UAT environments, and we’re looking forward to applying that ability to our larger customers,” says Ken Walsh, Product Manager, Constellation Financial Software. “The application loads very quickly, and all hosted in the cloud. We have plans to continue to add to this solution and upgrading to OpenEdge 12.1 has made it a whole lot slicker and a lot easier to work with.”