The Business Agility Blog

A few days after filling out my Google+ profile and circling a few early adopting friends, an article about the development of Google+ landed in my inbox. With over 10 million users in only a few weeks, and having just released a beta of our own social tool a few months ago, I’ve been hearing a lot about social well, everything. The article struck my interest, as it provides answers from Joseph Smarr, the Google+ technical lead, to a few popular questions.

More insightful than the answers themselves was the apparent focus and execution of business agility for such a huge company. Google’s history, though no doubt innovative in its search engine algorithm, have made large successes out of being second, third, and fourth mover with Gmail, Docs, Talk, (among others) and now Plus. That having been said, the astute concept of ‘circles’ clearly circumvents the usual “Facebook is for personal, LinkedIn is for professional” mentality. The jury is out on whether G+ will dominate the social scene, but this case of business agility is impressive to say the least.

Smarr is quoted in the article saying “We put extra emphasis on engineering speed/agility–we try to release code updates on a daily basis while still keeping quality/stability/latency as high as you’d expect from Google.” As an advocate for all things business agility, it’s nice to see 1) a successful launch of something built fast, 2) a positive response from millions of people, and 3) and enormous company able to pull it off. Sure, Google might be one of the most impressive companies of the information age, but plenty of other mega-corps should see this mindset trickle down to their own strategic plans.

Feedback is being collected from every user willing to provide it; one of the most important rules of agile – listen to your end users. Why rely on your own human capital when 10 million people have valuable opinions of their own – right? We built a feedback widget right into sprintr for this reason – release early, collect feedback, release often – your new agile development mantra perhaps. This mentality leads to great software, and based on their apparent focus on agility and feedback, I’m betting the guys at Google would agree.

Agile PaaS provider experiences successful first-half of the year, continues to show strong growth as a result of international expansion

BOSTON – July 27, 2011 – Mendix, the leading provider of the Agile Business Platform as a service (PaaS), today reported a record 237% growth in the first half of 2011, as compared to the first half of 2010. The company has seen a significant expansion of its global operations in the last six months.

Mendix attributes this extraordinary growth to its international operations, which has seen the addition of 15 new partners, Country Managers in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Benelux regions, and a Vice President of Global Marketing.

“We have seen a fantastic first half of the year,” said Derek Roos, CEO of Mendix. “We have almost doubled our customer base in only 6-months and are now serving clients in over 10-countries. With the recent launch of version 3.0 of our platform and many great additions to the team, I am very much looking forward to the second half of this year.”

This announcement comes on the heels of Mendix’s recently released Version 3.0 of its Agile Business Platform. Mendix 3.0 represents the first enterprise class Platform as a Service focusing on the agile application lifecycle management process – so users can rapidly build and deploy enterprise quality apps in the cloud.

Additionally, the company simultaneously launched sprintr™, the first social project collaboration site built specifically for agile project teams. In less than 60 days, over 300 organizations joined the site and began connecting their employees and product teams; giving them a simple way to collaborate throughout a project lifecycle. It also gives end-users the ability to provide feedback from directly within their applications.

“As more companies begin to realize that corporate-responsiveness and flexibility are critical to their survival, most also learn that their existing IT systems simply were not built for change,” continued Roos. “By using the Mendix Agile Business Platform on top of their existing systems, our clients have rapidly increased their business responsiveness, as well as the ROI of their existing investments.”

Version control is one of the more exciting features available in version 3.0 of the Mendix Agile Business Platform. Every business engineer I’ve talked to is revved up about how easy and automated this feature makes application development for distributed project teams. If you’ve ever been forced to use an external change management system to handle your versioning needs, you’ll understand the implications of having this functionality nestled into your design and runtime environments.

Check out the documentation for the whole story, but here’s the scoop:

In version 3.0 you have a centralized repository that contains both your model and resources. Each person working on the project has a local copy – this has a few benefits, most notably, its scalability. Because people work independently on local copies and not on one model, more people can work on the same project without constantly interfering with each other. Working offline is another welcome benefit, along with the speed at which you can develop without being constrained by the speed of your broadband connection.

We chose Subversion because of its popularity, maturity and solid Windows support. Building on top of Subversion means that we inherit its reliable protocols for sending and receiving changes. Subversion has a lot of operations that allow us to support advanced features like branching and merging. The Modeler simplifies Subversion commands by providing a layer over them. All common operations can be executed right from the Modeler.

Version Control changes the way you collaborate on a project. Instead of having one model where everyone directly saves all their changes, you work on your own copy of the project and choose an appropriate moment for uploading your changes to the repository and downloading changes from others.

Uploading your changes is called ‘committing’ (for most developers this is common lingo, but as you can build apps as a business engineer as well we’d like to be accurate). A commit is accompanied by a user-supplied message describing the changes so that you can quickly see what has happened when reviewing commits. Retrieving changes by others is called ‘updating’ and, like commit, is an explicit action. It can be compared to ‘refresh’ in the old way of working. However, it does not happen automatically when you open a project.

Since each revision is stored on the Team Server, you always have not one but dozens of backups of your project. You can always revert changes that you do not like or look at the project as it was a week ago. Together with the reliability and consistency improvements, you can develop with more confidence and we think that this is the best thing about version control.

This week we launched version 3.0 of the Mendix Agile Business Platform, now supporting full Agile Application Lifecycle Management in the cloud. There are quite a few additions that are sure to make your application landscape a lot more user friendly. Check out the release notes for the full technical deep dive, but in the meantime here’s the short version of what you need to know.

2 New additions to the lifecycle management process

Sprintr is now in public beta, accepting sign ups on a rolling basis. What is it? It’s a one-two punch of enterprise social collaboration and agile project management, rolled up into a lightweight web application and offered completely free. Your entire company can use it to collaborate on a dedicated company wall. You can create projects by collaborating on user stories, and track their progress with all the bells and whistles you’d want. Best of all, sprintr’s feedback module works with any website or web app – so you’ll be generating new user stories for the lifetime of your application.

The Enterprise Cloud Platform is your new control tower – it’s where you deploy applications, manage and monitor their performance and most of all, it’s your convenient dashboard to the multi-tenant cloud architecture. Model-execution-as-a-service, transport workflow, alerts, and backup management will give IT departments the time they need to focus on new initiatives. The end result: long term business agility.

Big Advances for Distributed Development Teams

Version Control – The Business Modeler now has an even easier way to version your models and provides advanced features like branching and merging. An intuitive conflict resolution mechanism assists you in merging all kinds of model changes even if another team member changed the same property as you did. Read more here.

Team Server Integration – Written on top of Subversion and delivered as a plugin to sprintr, the Team Server is designed to make the life of a Mendix Business Engineer easier. The Business Modeler is tightly integrated with the Team Server, so things like creating a new project (including a versioned model repository), updating, committing changes, merging model versions, etc. are all available from within the Business Modeler as a single click action. Read more here.

Well there you have it. Mendix 3.0 is already making our dev teams giddy with excitement – and that’s no small feat. Partners are getting first dibs on 3.0, but don’t worry, a trial version will be available by the end of the summer.

Cloud-based solution that uses social project collaboration to turn business ideas into enterprise applications, increasing long-term business agility

BOSTON – July 19, 2011 – Mendix, the leading provider of enterprise class platform-as-a-service (PaaS), today announced the release of version 3.0 of its Agile Business Platform. The new release simplifies the full agile application lifecycle management process by further enabling rapid development, deployment and management of enterprise applications in the cloud.

With over 20,000 users worldwide, the Mendix Agile Business Platform is a complete solution for developing and deploying enterprise applications.  Mendix customers develop their apps five to ten times faster than traditional development. Mendix bridges the gap between business and IT and decreases time-to-market by enabling users to rapidly develop, deploy and manage applications that smoothly integrate with any existing system.

With Version 3.0, Mendix’s agile solution further delivers on its speed and flexibility by simplifying the deployment and management of multiple Mendix applications. By providing a centralized, cloud-based Management Dashboard to monitor application performance and activity, IT departments now have complete control over their cloud application landscape, regardless of where the application is running.

“Mendix 3.0 allows your business to keep up with the pace that competitive markets demand” said Rob Boomsma, Practice Manager at Capgemini, a Mendix partner. “It is business smart and user centric; delivering speed to market and business-IT collaboration into a powerful package. This, combined with the track record that Mendix has earned over the past six years, makes the version 3.0 release excellent news to Capgemini and our clients.”

The new version also includes a cloud-based Team Server for supporting teams as small as a single developer up to globally distributed teams.  The Team Server will enable development teams to collaborate on the same project and provide them with several new features, including advanced version control and structured release management.

“Version 3.0 of the Mendix platform delivers increased business agility to our customers,” said Derek Roos, CEO of Mendix.  “Mendix is on the leading edge of helping business units and IT departments collaborate effectively and build enterprise-class applications. We’ve simplified the application lifecycle management process, while still providing the infrastructure needed to deliver extremely complex cloud-based applications.”

This announcement closely follows Mendix’s launch of sprintr™, the world’s first social project collaboration site dedicated to simplifying employee communications, across enterprise project teams. Fully integrated with Mendix 3.0, sprintr completes the full application lifecycle management process, with its agile project management functionality, as well as its built-in user feedback module that can be easily embedded in any website or web-based application.

Global business and IT consulting firm to use Mendix Agile Business Platform™ to renew value in its customer’s existing systems

BOSTON & ROTTERDAM, NETHERLANDS – July 6, 2011 – Mendix, the leading application platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider, today announces a partnership with Westernacher, a global business and IT consulting firm. The global partnership will provide Westernacher with the ability to simplify business-IT collaboration for their diverse client-base.

Westernacher’s vast SAP client-base will benefit from the agile platform’s established SAP certification. Its off-the-shelf SAP integration capabilities make it easy to extend highly complex environments, such as SAP. Westernacher will help Mendix reach these global clients and be able to simplify collaboration between business and IT.

“We have seen many SAP customers in need of extension and customization. Westernacher will be able to quickly and cost effectively add immense value to their SAP customer base with our platform,” said Derek Roos, CEO of Mendix.

Westernacher has broad expertise in several vertical market segments and numerous business applications; and the Mendix Agile Business Platform will be used to extend and renew value in the existing legacy systems for the company’s customers.

“Mendix will allow us to offer our clients a complete solution for agile application lifecycle management in the cloud, said Christian Wagner, CEO of Westernacher USA. “Using their platform we will be able to rapidly develop, deploy and manage applications that smoothly integrate with our customer’s existing legacy systems, especially our SAP clients.”

About Westernacher

Westernacher is an integrated business and IT consulting firm with a strong SAP practice. Our industry experience combined with our expertise in both business and IT allows us to solve complex problems for our customers in an innovative and successful manner. With over 200 professionals worldwide and offices in Europe, USA and Asia, Westernacher has been a trusted service provider since 1969.  For more information please visit, http://www. westernacher.com

Global consulting company to use Mendix to help its SAP client base extend their legacy system functionality

BOSTON – July 5, 2011 – Mendix, the leading application platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider, today announced its partnership with CIBER Netherlands, (CBR) a global full-service IT provider specializing in building, integrating and managing critical business systems and solutions. The global IT service provider plans to use Mendix for extending SAP’s functionality within its large client base.

With Mendix, organizations can simplify collaboration between business and IT, increasing their agility.  Using sprintr, teams can quickly capture new project requirements.  CIBER plans to develop solutions in the HR domain, focusing on user-friendliness, flexibility and speed of implementation and integration, especially in SAP environments.

Arno Rood, Managing Director of Mendix Benelux comments “We are very pleased to add Ciber to our growing partner community. Given Ciber’s domain expertise and leading role in Dutch technology market, the partnership will deliver great value to its client base.  This cooperation also demonstrates the value that the Mendix Agile Business Platform™ can bring to the SAP community. “

“CIBER will use the Mendix platform to quickly and easily develop and deploy applications in both SAP and non-SAP environments,” said Twan van den Broek, Service Line Manager at CIBER SAP NetWeaver.”Today’s development teams are expected to deal with constantly changing business requirements in a flexible way.The Mendix Agile Business Platform addresses this issue with, its simplified requirements gathering solution and its visual application modeling. We are always looking for ways to provide our customers with additional value – this partnership contributes greatly to that mission.”

About CIBER Netherlands
CIBER is a global full-service IT provider that specializes in building, integrating and managing critical business solutions and systems. Our solutions are both customized and delivered as a package. The services are provided for all technology platforms, operating systems and existing infrastructure. CIBER looks back on thirty years of international experience with clients in both government and industry with 9,000 employees worldwide generating a turnover of about $1 billion. In the Netherlands, CIBER has been operating for 15 years with about 550 employees from its offices in Eindhoven, Nieuwegein, Den Bosch, Rotterdam and Amsterdam.

CIBER Netherlands focuses on the high tech industry, utilities, government, wholesale, telecom, media, financial and business services. For more information, visit www.ciber.nl.