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Khali Henderson – ChannelPartners

There aren’t a lot of options for master agencies seeking to automate their back offices. In fact there are basically two: Choose from one of three purpose-built software solutions that may not do exactly what they need or spend a lot of money and time on a fully custom deployment. Now, there is a developer who wants to add a third option: a custom application without the custom price tag.

Mendix Inc., a software company based in Boston, says its agile computing platform enables it to build custom cloud solutions to automate complex business processes quickly and flexibly and for tens of thousands of dollars not hundreds.

That could be good news for master agencies. Their ability to differentiate themselves from the competitors can hinge on their ability to automate processes for their subagents and carriers. Using the same software as a competitor can put them back at square one.

Most master agencies have chosen between the two leading software packages: RPM Software’s Agent and Salestream Software’s Masterstream. The former is known primarily as a robust commissioning system and the latter as an instant multicarrier quoting tool. Both are praised for their capabilities, but often criticized for their limitations.

The lack of continued product development is understandable; the master agent market is small. Only one competitor has emerged to challenge the two incumbents. Qudex.com launched in fall 2009. It claims to handle inventory management, call accounting, audit management, reverse auction, RFP process management, infrastructure management, wireless management, network security, business process optimization, trouble-shooting and support. However, it also includes features just for agents, such as CRM, subagent and commission management.

Mendix’s Business Development Manager Vince de la Mar said Mendix Business Agility Suite can provide the functionality offered by all of these software applications and more. While he likes Mendix’s odds in a head-to-head comparison, he said that companies that already are using those solutions can continue to use them by integrating them into a custom Mendix portal.

“If you have a quoting application that works fine, we can integrate this into a Mendix portal and build out new functionality (e.g., commission automation, provisioning, trouble ticketing, opportunity management),” de la Mar said. “So you don’t always have to migrate; you can reuse existing components and investments.”

The ability to integrate with virtually any existing environment makes Mendix more flexible that most development platforms, de la Mar explained. It can accept data from any file, any database, any application and any Web service.

De la Mar said that Mendix, in fact, prefers not to recreate the wheel when it comes to CRM. “Instead of customizing standard CRM systems, it is our philosophy to keep them as they are and to build out all customizations and extensions in [the Mendix platform] on top,” he said.

Master agents can extend their CRM system to their subagents by building out a Mendix portal on top of their CRM system. Data input by subagents is tied back to the CRM system.

The Mendix approach falls somewhere between a custom development team and a rigid out-of-the-box solution. “We build it from scratch but reuse modules that we’ve built in the past. The result is that it’s a 100 percent fit with your processes,” de la Mar explained, noting this is important because no two master agencies do things exactly alike.

While a soup-to-nuts custom deployment commonly take 18 months to two years and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, a similar comprehensive project can be built on the Mendix platform in six months and at half the cost, de la Mar said.

But he said that projects can be much more modest with just quoting, order entry and commission automation. Such a solution could be built for around $25,000 to $35,000 plus a hosting and maintenance fee of $1,000 to $2,000 per month for up to 20 users. A one-year subscription fee is required.

De la Mar said Mendix is working on projects with several master agents presently, but declined to disclose the names.

IT Gets User Friendly

As the consumerization of IT continues to change the landscape of enterprise technology and the coinciding trend of mobile applications surges, will employees begin to expect a series of easily accessible applications customized to their enterprise? An interesting post from CIO’s Shane O’Neil brings light upon the emerging demand for a custom enterprise app store.

Depending on the current IT environment, this dream may be difficult to execute, but large organizations can better manage the way employees use their technology if they offer a convenient way of attaining, managing and updating it. Specifically, when it comes to mobile applications, where numerous options from Apple, Android, and Blackberry are used in conjunction with enterprise applications, does an enterprise AppStore make the most sense.

A Common User Experience

Enterprise IT systems are moving towards a common user interface customized to their brand aesthetic. In other words, every system a company uses will look, feel, and work in a similar fashion (at least on the top interface level). If this is the case, an enterprise AppStore full of apps and add-ons would be a logical method of distributing and managing applications and components of applications.

In my last post about the consumerization of IT, I mentioned the changing expectations employees have of their information technology. These employees are expecting their business applications to work like their personal applications. A custom enterprise AppStore fulfills this need, and may deter some of that IT irritation we’ve all come to experience.

Business-IT Alignment

The underlying theme of this post is the importance of user interaction with enterprise systems. How can companies make using their custom internal software easier? How can the adoption and maintenance of these applications take a note from consumer driven technology, but preserve its utility as a corporate asset?

These questions will be answered within the coming years, as enterprises offer an AppStore-like approach to technology management. Many organizations experience a sizeable gap between business and IT, and this may be one way to close it.

The topic of consumerization of IT has been floating around the blogosphere for quite some time now, so I thought I’d write a post with my perspective on the matter.  From what I gather, consumerization of IT means that businesses, and users, are becoming more powerful with modern tools and plug-and-play apps – ones that are more consumer-driven by nature. This is good (more business agility) but can be a risk too, if not monitored/controlled by some higher vision/architecture.

Fast and Easy Adoption

The success of cloud applications for consumers often relates to the friction involved in adopting the technology. In other words, how easy is it to bring this new technology into my everyday life (and in this case, my professional life)? From the enterprise perspective, this adoption process is on a grand scale and requires a number of stakeholders to be involved – both from business and IT. Both business and IT people need to understand the added value of the application and how it will be adopted within the enterprise.

Several features of the Mendix platform allow enterprise IT to treat very complex mission critical applications as though they are consumer focused cloud apps. The influx of consumer applications in the workplace has given employees new expectations for the business applications they use on a daily basis. The reason I think Mendix applications fit into this category of ‘consumerized’ IT is that they are innately flexible enough to deal with these new expectations.

A Recommendation for IT

These technologies are getting easier for companies to adopt – besides being open to new philosophies it is important that business and IT work together and create a common goal of more business-enablement in combination with adhering to standards and architecture; not easy, but it can be done. Some companies are looking at this in the composite application space where they’re extending functionality of existing systems and using these platforms versus a wholesale changeover approach from the heyday of ERPs.

Based on the current rate of market adoption of these technologies, this looks to be a positive trend. At Mendix we’re trying to make building enterprise class web apps quicker and easier, so that they become more adaptable to change and innately ‘future proof.’ Flexibility in these applications provides business agility for the organization as a whole – a very positive impact for many, if not all, of our users.

Since I’m trapped at home today in the midst of a blizzard (I live in the Boston area), I thought I’d use the time to post my first ever Mendix blog.  For those that do not know, I joined the company late last year as their head of Global Marketing.

Joining Mendix was actually quite an easy decision for me.  I wanted a cool company (Gartner actually says that they ARE ONE), with bright minds and a hot product.  Not too much to ask…well you wouldn’t think so, but there are a lot of startups out there that do not possess ALL THREE of these qualities.

Beyond that I really wanted a company that was doing interesting things in the agile development arena, as I have been very intrigued by the agile philosophy, ever since my previous company implemented it.  Enter Mendix.  We just issued a press release detailing our 2010 accomplishments.  It was really quite a year for us.   We posted our fifth consecutive year of triple digit growth.  The Mendix users really love the speed and flexibility of our Agile Business Platform

We also launched the first Agile App Store, where Mendix users and partners are sharing applications, widgets and themes. Our App Store is being further fueled by our growing community. It is becoming one of the most popular destinations for agile teams.

I’m really looking forward to 2011 with Mendix.  We have many new and exciting plans for the upcoming year, including new products and a greater international expansion.  What makes Mendix cool is that it has developed a very unique technology – one that solves business problems – it improves business agility by streamlining operations, reducing risk and decreasing cost.  Now, back out to shovel the driveway…again.

- Paul Campaniello

Company sees triple-digit customer growth, launches new agile App Store, new trial version of the product and expanding community adoption

BOSTON, MA & ROTTERDAM, NL – January 13, 2010 – Mendix, an agile business application platform and cloud services company, today announces that in 2010 its customer base doubled and the Mendix community remains the most active community in the agile development arena with triple the agile experts participating. The Mendix Agile Business Platform™ is an agile application and collaboration platform that improves business agility by streamlining business operations, reducing risk and decreasing cost.

In July Mendix launched the industry’s first agile App Store, enabling users worldwide to share agile development components.  Fueled by the Mendix online community, which maintains its lead as a resource for agile developers, the App Store offers a one-stop shop to gain access to leading applications, plug ins and application solution needs for most organizations.

Mendix released version 2.5 of The Mendix Agile Business Platform™ in 2010, offering it as a service (PaaS) in the cloud.  The new version of the Mendix Agile Business Platform™ enables businesses of all sizes to optimize business-IT collaboration.  The platform uses a unique visual modeling technology to rapidly build and manage applications that smoothly integrate with existing systems.

“We are happy with our 2010 growth but more importantly, we are extremely excited about seeing our community of partners and users flourish,” said Derek Roos, CEO of Mendix. “Seeing such a rapid population of our App Store and such a significant growth of our community clearly shows the value of the platform for agile teams.”

Mendix is so easy to deploy, the company also made a trial version of its product available to the general public, enabling users to experience firsthand the benefits of its agile platform.  The speed and simplicity at which applications are being deployed and managed is unprecedented, both on site and in the cloud.  Independent research has proven that applications can be built five times faster on the Mendix platform than via traditional models.

Business Computing World, IT Leadership

David Norfolk – Following on from my last piece on CIM (the Computation Independent Model), I thought I’d take a quick look at Aptero Solutions’ technology offering.

I have to admit that I seem to be rather on Aptero’s wavelength and probably have been since the days of Select Business Solutions. Both Aptero and another company whose approach to automated software development and systems engineering I like, Atego, have roots in Select; a company I’ve been following since way before I joined Bloor, although the fire seems to have gone out of Select of late.

When I met Aptero first, what struck me was the breadth of its offering, from low ceremony business process automation through to high ceremony MDA if required—and the possibility of moving between these approaches without major rework.

This could address a concern I’ve had since the early days of CASE—development automation is “owned” by people who write code and expect things to be complete and correct at all times. This is feasible (although, sadly, not always the case) in the abstracted model of the real world represented by the code of a computer program—but the real world just isn’t like that. The real-world works on fuzzy logic, has “chaotic” behaviours (in the mathematical sense) and features self-healing systems (in the General Systems Theory sense) in dynamic equilibrium with their environment. The business works at a “make do and mend” level, with “just enough” completeness and consistency to get the job done without breaking the law—and that isn’t very easy for the technology side of IT; and even more uncomfortable for the people in IT.

However, to my mind (and I started off as an assembler programmer, database systems programmer and DBA), the code side of IT is the easy bit—it’s translating the ambiguity and chaos of real world business systems into the rigidity of code and providing manual procedures for the special cases and risk management where the fun is!

Anyway it seems to me that conventional model-driven approaches tend to be either high ceremony, which isn’t always appropriate or agile enough; or low ceremony, which is fine and agile until complexity increases and regulators etc. get interested. With agile, low ceremony approaches you often seem to fall off a cliff and have to re-engineer everything from scratch when things get successful (I think I remember the CTO at eBay or some such describing just such a scenario).

I think there’s a middle way and that what most people need is “just enough” ceremony—and that what “just enough” is changes as automation becomes more or less critical to the business; or customer expectations change…

I ran these ideas past Phil Webb at Aptero Solutions and his response was that “what you describe is certainly our philosophy, albeit not one which we have yet described in whitepapers and the like”.

Nevertheless, Webb points out that it may be rather easier to describe this approach than to implement it, as yet, although the attempt is well worthwhile: “since we have two different tool-sets—potentially low-ceremony executable business mode delivery with Mendix and potentially higher-ceremony business-driven software engineering powered by MID—from two separate vendors, switching between approaches will be less straightforward, but it’s important, we feel, that we understand that both approaches are necessary in differing circumstances and that the offerings we provide are flexible enough to cope to as great an extent as possible.

For instance, the Mendix offering allows more complex integration needs, or processing requirements, to be fulfilled through external Java libraries and the like which may be plugged in. One can therefore envisage the use of MDA techniques (provided by the MID toolset) to enable the production of libraries, which are then plugged into the agile Mendix processes”.

Once again, the issue, it seems to me, is that the technology stakeholders in the business process automation business are often too firmly in the driving seat. All the stakeholders, including those in the business, must share responsibility for business system automation—and putting the business too firmly in the driving seat would be a problem too.

What I am also sure of, is that although software vendors are an important facilitator for all this, and should be treated as stakeholders, they definitely must notbe in the driving seat! Sometimes, they are; and sometimes IT, which like new toys, encourages them. It amazes me that there are aren’t more end-user communities with real teeth, to balance the undoubted power of the major vendors.

Many business analysts and heads of industry find themselves in compromising situations. Their team is down and they can’t seem to move the business properly towards the goal. It seems your competitor across the field is always one step ahead, providing results and fan [customer] satisfaction. But how did they do it and why can’t you come back?

Game Planning

This powerful opponent of yours has come up with a great game plan. The product they use – whether it’s the right gloves, cleats, breathable uniforms, etc. in sports – or a better system from order receipt, to entry, to delivery in business – is fundamentally better… but why? Did this opponent read the weather forecast and plan for adverse conditions? Are they just more talented with players or products that are just better suited for the game? Do they have systems in place that allow for adjustment depending on what is working and what isn’t?

Adjustments

Many of us head into planning a certain way based on what we have and who we’re up against. Let’s say you’re going into the match against the #1 passing team in the league. You spent the whole week practicing your nickel pass defense with plans to stop their attack. But what happens when you get into the game and you realize that their third string ball carrier is a beast? He’s tearing your defense up all over the field. Do you continue to play the pass even though they are running on every single down? No, you need to adjust your game to play with them.

In business it’s the same way, let’s take the classic example of the traditional video store. For years it was all about having the largest selection, being in a convenient location, and providing rentals at a reasonable price. In comes a new team with a new strategy, let the customer handle every transaction online without ever having to leave their house. Some of the traditional storefronts adjusted, downsizing locations and adding a similar online offering to their large customer base.

How does this all tie together?

Much like the coach that is able to switch his defense to line up eight in the box against the team running all over them, the large video store needs to be able to position itself against a competitor’s strategy. But what if this company doesn’t have the ability modify its business strategy? What if they need a complete overhaul of its application infrastructure to do so? This is going to cost the business large amounts of time and money. The money will absolutely have to be spent if the company wants to stay in the game for the long haul. But what about the time it takes to develop the application?

Many of the mid-sized video providers didn’t have the brand, size, nor money to bridge them into this new age of video rental. By the time they were able to come to market with a suitable offering, they were competing against the other small companies who also didn’t adapt fast enough. Do yourself a favor and build your original application on a platform that is agile and can change with your business needs. That’s the moral of this story – agility wins.