Progress customers maximize their return on investment with BravePoint
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Industry:
AutomotiveProducts:
OpenEdgeChallenge
BravePoint’s customers require modernizing of their existing Progress Software-based systems while minimizing development, implementation and maintenance costs.
Solution
BravePoint offers everything its clients need to streamline business processes, including applications to help migrate legacy systems to the Web and augmentation packages to help clients achieve ultimate results from their Progress-based systems.
Result
BravePoint’s customers attain a modern system at a substantial lower cost and time-to-deployment than if they had chosen to move to a completely new solution.
Challenge
Imagine a company has invested tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years to develop, customize and maintain an application that is essential to running their business. Unfortunately, the application has just not kept up with the rapid pace of market change or evolving customer expectations. This is the reality facing many organizations today–across industries, regions and countries. Some are opting to abandon their investment, hoping a brand new solution will solve the problem, despite the inevitable implementation, customization, training and maintenance costs required.
Solution
BravePoint’s customers have found another way to reap the benefits of a modern, state-of-the art solution while leveraging their existing Progress Software investment. “With the Progress platform you can get a greater return on your investment without making some really expensive, risky decisions,” explains Alex Oliveri, Vice President of Operations for BravePoint. “You can add functionality to a mobile user, build a new module that you’ve always wanted, or maybe rewrite a module built on old technology to keep up with the competition. There are so many options out there right now for existing OpenEdge users.”
In business for over 26 years, BravePoint was one of the first IT companies to recognize the demand for skilled technical consultants in Progress technologies. Over the years the company has grown to become the largest provider of Progress consulting, training and database services in the world. BravePoint offers everything its clients need and demand to streamline business processes, including applications to help migrate legacy systems of all types to the Web and augmentation packages to help clients get the most from their Progress-based systems.
With 125 employees, BravePoint is a wholly owned subsidiary of Chesapeake Utilities Corporation, a $650+ million diversified utility company. BravePoint serves the needs of organizations as diverse as ADP, Northrop Grumman, US Army and Navy, Johns Hopkins University, Eaton and many others.
“While every client project is different, it is safe to say that all of our customers are realizing substantial ROI by leveraging their existing Progress-based systems,” explains Barbara Ware, Director of Marketing for BravePoint. “At a minimum, by implementing a brand new solution the customer would incur costs associated with buying and deploying the product, tailoring that solution to meet their unique needs, migrating the existing data, and training employees. And then they would need to factor in the amount of time all of that would take. At BravePoint we are able to leverage much of a customer’s existing investment and focus the majority of our time, energy and costs on making changes only where they are needed, for example developing a new UI.”
BravePoint knows firsthand what its customers are experiencing. A few years ago the Progress Consulting partner also became a Progress Application partner when it acquired an ISV with an application developed for the subcontractor industry. BravePoint completely modernized the legacy Progress-based application, re-launching the solution as ProfitZoom, an application designed specifically for subcontractor’s profitability that integrates everything from dispatching to inventory to job costing. The project was so successful that BravePoint was able to generalize the framework it used which it now calls Application Evolution. The solution is a modernization framework that BravePoint offers to legacy Progress partners and end users that want to move forward without losing the strength of their production database or their product.
“Similar to our own experience with ProfitZoom, our success is our ability to help our customers find ways to keep the strength of their solutions, which is their Progress database and their underlying business logic, while evolving their solutions to create a modern, state-of-the-art system,” explains Bruce Thompson, OpenEdge Enterprise Account Manager for BravePoint. “We are able to show our clients that Progress technology truly is ‘Future Proof’; that there is tremendous value in their existing solid, scalable and reliable Progress platform. We help them find ways to modernize their applications instead of ripping and replacing them, for example through integration with third-party applications, by creating a new graphical user interface, or moving to a new deployment platform like mobile, SaaS or the cloud. The end result is that our customers get a modern system at a substantial lower cost and time-to-deployment than if they had simply chosen to move to a completely new solution.”
In business for over 26 years, BravePoint was one of the first IT companies to recognize the demand for skilled technical consultants in Progress technologies. Over the years the company has grown to become the largest provider of Progress consulting, training and database services in the world. BravePoint offers everything its clients need and demand to streamline business processes, including applications to help migrate legacy systems of all types to the Web and augmentation packages to help clients get the most from their Progress-based systems.
With 125 employees, BravePoint is a wholly owned subsidiary of Chesapeake Utilities Corporation, a $650+ million diversified utility company. BravePoint serves the needs of organizations as diverse as ADP, Northrop Grumman, US Army and Navy, Johns Hopkins University, Eaton and many others.
“While every client project is different, it is safe to say that all of our customers are realizing substantial ROI by leveraging their existing Progress-based systems,” explains Barbara Ware, Director of Marketing for BravePoint. “At a minimum, by implementing a brand new solution the customer would incur costs associated with buying and deploying the product, tailoring that solution to meet their unique needs, migrating the existing data, and training employees. And then they would need to factor in the amount of time all of that would take. At BravePoint we are able to leverage much of a customer’s existing investment and focus the majority of our time, energy and costs on making changes only where they are needed, for example developing a new UI.”
BravePoint knows firsthand what its customers are experiencing. A few years ago the Progress Consulting partner also became a Progress Application partner when it acquired an ISV with an application developed for the subcontractor industry. BravePoint completely modernized the legacy Progress-based application, re-launching the solution as ProfitZoom, an application designed specifically for subcontractor’s profitability that integrates everything from dispatching to inventory to job costing. The project was so successful that BravePoint was able to generalize the framework it used which it now calls Application Evolution. The solution is a modernization framework that BravePoint offers to legacy Progress partners and end users that want to move forward without losing the strength of their production database or their product.
“Similar to our own experience with ProfitZoom, our success is our ability to help our customers find ways to keep the strength of their solutions, which is their Progress database and their underlying business logic, while evolving their solutions to create a modern, state-of-the-art system,” explains Bruce Thompson, OpenEdge Enterprise Account Manager for BravePoint. “We are able to show our clients that Progress technology truly is ‘Future Proof’; that there is tremendous value in their existing solid, scalable and reliable Progress platform. We help them find ways to modernize their applications instead of ripping and replacing them, for example through integration with third-party applications, by creating a new graphical user interface, or moving to a new deployment platform like mobile, SaaS or the cloud. The end result is that our customers get a modern system at a substantial lower cost and time-to-deployment than if they had simply chosen to move to a completely new solution.”
Result
While BravePoint does work with a variety of different technologies, Ware says time and again Progress is at the top of the list. “We can work with other solutions if need be, but Progress continues to be our favorite. In our hearts we are always pushing for our clients to stay with Progress because we know that there is no reason not to; it is simply the best.”
Thompson says there are a number of reasons Progress continues to be the right choice for BravePoint’s customers. “From a database standpoint it’s easy to manage, it’s solid, and it doesn’t have to be babysat like some of the other databases. It’s more intuitive in a lot of ways. And it can easily go toe to toe with competitive solutions, like Oracle. The system can scale to meet any requirement while maintaining superior performance levels. For example, we have a customer that is in the teens of terabytes that’s running on Progress. Unlike competitive solutions, the majority of Progress customers don’t need to hire a full time DBA, which is a major advantage. The language itself is very flexible. And the ability to integrate non-Progress solutions with OpenEdge is a huge benefit.”
The fact that Progress is committed to delivering continuous innovation to the industry is critical to BravePoint’s own ability to deliver enhancements to its clients. The company is looking forward to taking advantage of the new Progress Pacific solution, particularly the Rollbase cloud platform that allows rapid creation of SaaS business applications using pointand-click, drag-and-drop tools in a standard Web browser with a minimal amount of code. “We were really impressed with Rollbase from the speed and the ability it took to develop a prototype. The integration opportunities of Rollbase are very exciting to us. Within a matter of hours Rollbase will enable us to design and develop full-featured web-based business applications.”
BravePoint also sees tremendous value in the Progress Corticon Business Rules Management System (BRMS) for delivering high-quality, high-fidelity, high-performance automated business decisions. “We expect our customers will be asking for that functionality in the very near future. It is good to know that with Progress we already have the ability to deliver.”
Thompson says there are a number of reasons Progress continues to be the right choice for BravePoint’s customers. “From a database standpoint it’s easy to manage, it’s solid, and it doesn’t have to be babysat like some of the other databases. It’s more intuitive in a lot of ways. And it can easily go toe to toe with competitive solutions, like Oracle. The system can scale to meet any requirement while maintaining superior performance levels. For example, we have a customer that is in the teens of terabytes that’s running on Progress. Unlike competitive solutions, the majority of Progress customers don’t need to hire a full time DBA, which is a major advantage. The language itself is very flexible. And the ability to integrate non-Progress solutions with OpenEdge is a huge benefit.”
The fact that Progress is committed to delivering continuous innovation to the industry is critical to BravePoint’s own ability to deliver enhancements to its clients. The company is looking forward to taking advantage of the new Progress Pacific solution, particularly the Rollbase cloud platform that allows rapid creation of SaaS business applications using pointand-click, drag-and-drop tools in a standard Web browser with a minimal amount of code. “We were really impressed with Rollbase from the speed and the ability it took to develop a prototype. The integration opportunities of Rollbase are very exciting to us. Within a matter of hours Rollbase will enable us to design and develop full-featured web-based business applications.”
BravePoint also sees tremendous value in the Progress Corticon Business Rules Management System (BRMS) for delivering high-quality, high-fidelity, high-performance automated business decisions. “We expect our customers will be asking for that functionality in the very near future. It is good to know that with Progress we already have the ability to deliver.”