Application Development Meets BPM in the Cloud

Progress Software wants to change the way IT organizations think about developing business applications.

IT organizations tend to think in terms of pieces of code that make up an application. But an application is really a digital abstraction of a business process. And most business processes are made up of discrete sets of tasks, and more often than not, many of the tasks within different sets of business processes are identical. For example, the order to cash process within any number of vertical industries is essentially the same.

Given that, Colleen Smith, vice president of SaaS for Progress Software, says that the future of business application development is going to be defined by reusing sets of business processes that are actually made up of modular sets of application code. To facilitate that evolution, Progress Software recently rolled out a Progress OpenEdge BPM platform, which combines application development technology from Progress with Savvion business process management technology that makes it easier to build, deploy and manage a business process both in the cloud and on premise. Progress acquired Savvion earlier this year.

By pulling these technologies together, Smith says that Progress is creating the first platform that unifies application development and business process management.

Naturally, it’s going to take some time for this next evolution of application development to take hold. But given half a chance, the business community will quickly take to the concept of reusing business processes across the cloud. The challenge facing developers, says Smith will be how to get their heads out of the low-level code and into the cloud where the business logic will ultimately be deployed. The good news is once they make that intellectual leap, a whole new world of money-making possibilities should unfold.