Feb 28, 2020
LexisNexis is one of the world's leading providers of information to professional services. I work on the UK side, so we look primarily after the needs of legal and tax professionals in the UK, providing information, technology and analytics.
At LexisNexis, we deliver our information through a variety of sources. There's a huge amount of data we have in our own data centers. Predominantly we deliver through our own technology, be that web or specific point solutions. We're now on the third iteration of the evolution journey and that's around cloud, web enablement and delivery of mobile. We've just begun the development and delivery of new web UI, new tools that work within Microsoft Office 365—it’s a really exciting part of that evolution that we're on now.
Two or three years ago, our clients helped identify a challenge within reporting, the ability to provide current information on the dataset from Visualfiles (a case management system from LexisNexis). At the time, we had our data extract, transform, load (ETL) solution that worked overnight. It extracted data out of Visualfiles, transformed it and loaded it into a separate SQL warehouse. That was working well, and many clients used it. The challenge, however, was that it ran overnight, it wasn't done in real time.
Did we look at alternatives? We spent weeks looking at alternatives. We looked at alternative non-OpenEdge, non-Progress solutions. We looked at letting clients just go free format and do whatever they wanted. Yeah, we explored the whole set of opportunities. And at the time, we were in discussion with the OpenEdge Pro2 team and they were offering us the flexibility to take some of the components and mold something that was almost personalized for the Visualfiles world. It was an ideal set up.
Why did we decide on OpenEdge Pro2? Because it was the right solution at the right time that answered the challenges that we had. Rather than just being OpenEdge Pro2 as it was, we had the opportunity to shape it and mold it into what we needed.
With the old ETL solution, you're always going to be 12 hours out of sync. And increasingly, our clients’ clients were demanding more timely information that ultimately couldn't be delivered. Now it can with that near real-time feed. We're working with some real large organizations that have incredibly high transactional processing volumes and they are working in sub-10 second synchronization. It's fantastic.
We're seduced by the rocket ship of OpenEdge 12 and we’re really excited about how we can adopt that and get all those benefits and deliver a faster working solution for our clients.
For additional information on OpenEdge Pro2 please visit: https://www.progress.com/openedge/features/openedge-pro2