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i3 Software, a global IT firm headquartered in New Jersey, has partnered with Mendix Inc to develop software solutions for clients working in specific software environments. IT systems that minimize data entry and automate processes are high in demand, as many of these organizations rely on outdated IT systems and manual labor to complete daily tasks.

With thirteen years of experience in enterprise software architecture for the insurance industry, the partnership will focus on developing solutions for insurance organizations that require fast integration and additional functionality. i3 Software specializes in software applications and systems integration centered around enterprise management services.

The Mendix platform is built for extremely fast delivery of business applications, making it the choice platform for adapting systems developed by i3 Software. In particular, PointIn – a policy administration system created by CSC – requires added functionality to track policies over time.

First NonProfit will be the first organization to benefit from this partnership. The insurance company has over thirty years of experience in providing coverage to non-profit organizations. The solution is estimated to save 1.7 million dollars within three years, and will prepare the firm for future IT initiatives.

Subra Atreyasa, VP of Sales at i3 Software, explains the partnership dynamic of the project. “i3 will focus on exposing First NonProfit’s back office systems via web portal so that Mendix can go in to create a user friendly front end system.” Both firms expect these solutions to increase in demand as more insurance organizations realize the possibilities in agile, process-oriented solutions.

Dale Zwizinski, VP of Sales at Mendix Inc, reiterates the benefits of the partnership. “The partnership with i3 is a win-win proposition – the Mendix platform has agile and flexible capabilities that when combined with i3’s experience in insurance systems integration, makes our partnership an unmatched value proposition for First NonProfit and other insurance companies.”

In a recent blog post on Modeling-Languages, well-known blogger and technology expert Jordi Cabot interviewed our own Head of Research and Development; Johan den Haan. The conversation uncovered some interesting insights into the evolution of the Mendix platform, and its place within accelerating technological trends.

To start, where did the idea come from?

We know that Mendix software is differentiated by its simplicity and its ability to utilize collaboration between business users and software developers. By giving business users a more important role in the overall application development, the end product is more satisfactory.

Sounds logical, right? So here’s what Johan had to say about the initial motivation behind the product:

“The first motivation was trying to automate the development activities they were doing over and over again, this is one of the main reasons for MDD [Model Driven Development]. But afterwords we saw that current MDD tools were oriented to developer productivity and in our opinion one of the main benefits of MDD can be, if you create the right tool, that domain experts can be involved in the development projects. Communication with users could be much easier. Therefore, the main motivation is to create a tool aimed not to developers but to business engineers (people with analytical skills but not necessarily with a background in IT) who can model the application and add customer value.”

Ok, easier said than done. How can business engineers pull this off?

It’s all about visual modeling. With pictures, you start out with the big idea and drill down into the details. With words, you start with the details and then gain the big picture later. Johan seems to agree:

“The most important thing is to provide visual models. I know there is a lot of discussion on textual vs. graphical DSLs but visual models are easier to grasp for non-technical people.”

And the end result? Is software development changing before our eyes?!

It seems like more businesses are catching onto the value in abstracted software development that allows end users to participate. It’s faster, cheaper, and more satisfactory. It’s like building houses from bricks made of sand, rather than building them from the sand itself. Johan, on the benefits of Mendix software:

“We really aim at bringing software development to a higher abstraction level. We target domain experts. We don’t generate code that then needs to be edited, compiled, deployed… We just want to model and run. People do not need to know anything about software development to build an application. It’s just one click deploy.”

Johan goes on to provide his thoughts on the future popularity of Model Driven Development…

“There will be a growing adoption of MDD but people won’t call it MDD. It’s more a movement that includes what I see as the three main trends in the evolution of software development: cloud (avoiding infrastructure issues), MDD and app stores (in a broad sense: building an application from scratch but by combining pre-built components from other sources).”

The thought-provoking interview hits on many subjects we’ve covered in the business agility blog. Johan provides valuable insights from behind the scenes about visual modeling, cloud computing, and the evolution of the Mendix platform from day one until now. Don’t hesitate to read the full interview, and check back often for more posts in the business agility blog.

The medical device industry has found itself on the front lines of the battle for Transparency. Legislators, backed by the public’s trepidation, have mandated that all medical device organizations are to report their expenditures to health-care professionals (HCPs). The Physician Payments Sunshine Act of 2009, a piece of the overall health-care reform, aims to air out the relationship between sales representative and health care professionals. Massachusetts and Vermont are the first two states to require reporting of these metrics, and by 2013, these laws will be enforced at a federal level.

Changing Tendencies of Med Device Sales Reps

The rationale for such laws exists, as the connection between HCP purchasing tendencies and sales budgets, have become peculiarly correlated over the past decade. The US is consuming these products at an all time high, and as the government gets comfortable in the health-care realm, more regulations and policies are to follow.

Data Dilemma for Medical Device Compliance

So what does this legislation mean for the business engineers of these organizations? Medical device organizations will find themselves between a rock and a hard place, so to speak, as they have never been asked to report this data before. Many of these organizations have minimal IT resources, making it even more difficult to comply with the new regulations.

Enter the SpendValidator^TM, a pearl of an online application that facilitates the compliance process. This is a new way of thinking about your enterprise compliance solution. Focused on the medical device compliance data dilemma, SpendValidator^TM adds value with its ability to validate and enrich HCP spend data. A two pronged proposition makes SpendValidator^TM a simple decision for compliance managers:

1. The solution enables data validation, both manually and automatically, that may be incorrect or inconsistent
2. The agile development platform is nimble enough for mandated deadlines and changing regulations

Business Agility by Necessity

When compliance is the primary motivator for technical improvement, organizations have a need for both speed and accuracy – two attributes that rarely go hand in hand when developing software. Then again, these organizations are some of the most resourceful and resource-full entities in the United States economy.

It will be interesting to see how they prepare for, and react to, political forces lifting the veil on their spend activities. Check out what the brains at Mendix are doing to facilitate medical device organizations under the watchful eye of Washington.

Last week, Mendix’ head of RnD Johan den Haan had the opportunity to speak at the SDN event, a conference dedicated to .Net, Architecture, Information Worker, Delphi, Databases, User eXperience, DotNetNuke, Core Systems, SharePoint 2010, the design of GUIs, testing and debugging of real-world Delphi applications. Needless to say, leading national and international software developers were in attendance.

Johan had prepared a presentation that focused on improving productivity, business and IT alignment, as well as the quality of software development. As the audience mostly consisted of programmers, his ultimate goal was to discuss with attendees the future of software development, and whether it will involve modeling or programming.

The presentation started with an introduction to why software should be developed more cost effectively, faster and above all, better. Johan illustrated this idea with  several recent articles from industry magazines about failed software development projects.  Proving once and for all that although much has improved throughout the last decade, software development is still failure-prone.

These failures indicate that although much has been done, we should be looking for a new boost in productivity. During his presentation, Johan explained that MDD (model-driven development) infuses the development adrenaline that the doctor called for. Although some visitors were skeptical about this statement, Johan proved otherwise to the audience by building an application from scratch using the Mendix platform in less than 15 minutes.

Using widgets and styling themes from the recently released Mendix App Store, Johan showed the audience what this productivity boost could look like using the Mendix platform. With only a few mouse clicks he embedded Google maps in less than a minute, then restyled the complete application in the Apple Macbook’ start up theme, further impressing the audience.

The most interesting points of discussion were questions regarding how to  treat requirements that cannot be modeled ( the biggest Achilles’  heel of the  so called 4^th generation (programming) languages, 4 GL for short) . Johan explained that this is no longer an issue, or at least not on the Mendix platform, due to the ability to add custom java code to your model. He even illustrated this by adding some custom Java to the application he just had developed.

What the future of software development will look like, nobody knows. Our gut feeling is that MDD will prove to be a valuable driver of productivity, business alignment, and quality within software development.