A recent CIO.com article by Kevin Fogarty aptly named “How To Keep Rogue Cloud Software From Making IT Irrelevant” inspired me to revisit my post about the rising demand for centralized Enterprise AppStores and the IT consumerization fueling it. Fogarty takes an interesting perspective, somewhat inarguably stating that reported statistics about SaaS usage are inaccurate “because they don’t count the business units that are buying cloud services behind IT’s back.”
According to Forrester, “Informal buyers from outside IT buy infrastructure-as-a-service twice as often as “formal” buyers inside IT, and the informal make five times as many software buying decisions as the IT people who are supposed to be in charge.” Reasons for this dichotomy range from strict company policies to the delay when working through IT departments; clearly it’s easier for employees to adopt cloud applications on their own.
Downsides to this are a general lack of organization within the IT landscape, what Fogarty refers to as “cloud sprawl” – the negative side effects of having numerous logins to non-integrated systems, multiple costly subscriptions to cloud apps, and of course – a justifiable fear of the unknown security in place. The article goes on to explain several ways to improve the relationship between business and IT, so that business department managers can feel comfortably relying on IT departments to get them the technology they need.
The central issue, not at all new to IT departments, lies in the evolved distribution mechanism of software: when the general population can access software by tapping a touch screen, employees come to expect comparable luxury at the office. IT can only do so much to compete with consumer focused cloud applications that require no integration or security protocols. Only a few platforms, like the newest version of Mendix, give IT departments the agility and speed they need to properly enable business units.
The idea of an enterprise appstore may be somewhat utopian for most businesses, but the steps that IT departments need to take, and the technological capabilities they’ll need to move towards true business agility, are now evident. It seems as though changing requirements of an enterprise IT department mirror the changing requirements of a single application – except application development can be agile, whereas entire IT departments need to be agile in order to compete. How is the IT department at your organization managing changing demands of business owners?
Animated Short: Application Consumerization
BOSTON – Aug 23, 2011 – Mendix, , the leading Agile Business Platform as a service (PaaS) provider, today announced a new partnership with Navigator Technologies, a value added reseller specializing in integration with Microsoft Dynamics NAV (formally Navision). Navigator Technologies will utilize the Mendix Agile Business Platform™ to add new applications to existing Microsoft Dynamics NAV implementations and rapidly develop agile web applications.
To kick off the partnership, Mendix and Navigator Technologies will be holding a webinar for other value added resellers that specialize in Microsoft Dynamics NAV implementations. Mendix’s off-the-shelf integration capabilities make it easy to extend highly complex environments, such as Microsoft Dynamics NAV.
The Mendix Agile Business Platform has been used successfully by many Microsoft Dynamics customers to integrate and extend these systems. Extending these applications with Mendix takes very little upfront investments when compared with more drastic measures.
Kirk Goodwin, CEO of Navigator Technologies, explains “The Mendix platform offers the fastest, most efficient way to extend Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Microsoft Dynamics NAV partners benefit greatly using the platform to extend their customer’s applications. I look forward to showcasing the platform during our webinar, on September 7th at 11:00am EDT.
“The demand for extending Microsoft Dynamics NAV – and other ERP solutions – is substantial. Customers are looking for their existing systems to adapt to their ever changing business requirements,” said Vincent de la Mar, Partner and Business Development Manager at Mendix. “Mendix enables partners and customers to do exactly that by taking the best of existing systems and easily extending them with custom web apps.”
*Updated: To watch a recording of the Mendix-Navision webinar, click here.
About Navigator Technologies
For the past 20 years, Navigator has been helping companies with their technologies and business processes. We have helped companies navigate the evolution of DOS to Windows. We have helped companies navigate from bulletin boards to dial-up internet to broadband. We have helped companies navigate from the paper ledger to the accounting ledger to the ERP system. As we enter our third decade, we are now a leader in the navigation from on-premise applications to the cloud.
One of the common misconceptions about “going cloud” is that you lose control of your applications. With the launch of the Mendix 3.0 Enterprise Cloud Platform, we put this worries to rest with extensive monitoring options. We’ve already showed how you can manage your app jungle in the cloud with our transport worklow. Now it’s time to zoom in on monitoring your app performance in the Mendix Enterprise Cloud Platform.
What’s going on with my apps?
We’ve seen the image below before, but now let’s make your DevOps or SysOps department happy with a clear overview of the health of all your apps, instead of focusing on transporting between acceptance, test and production environments. You can immediately see which apps have issues:
Often times, you will deploy an app and forget about it. Weeks, or possibly months later, users notice that the app is performing slow or crashes often. You had no easy way of keeping track of the state of your app.
An app turns red when the app stops responding or when certain metrics (such as cpu, memory, app container disk usage, database disk usage etc.) approach a critical level. Obviously, this is why you need a a clear overview of the performance of all of your apps.
It’s also possible to build custom health checks in your app, when these approach a certain threshold your app turns orange in the overview. For example, you have an app that processes healthcare declarations , normally between 1,000 and 10,000 a week. At some point your app receives 100,000 declarations, this seems fishy and might be caused by a bug or a sudden change in the healthcare bill itself. The important thing is that you need to know about it before your app crashes, so you have time to either fix the bug or provide more CPU and memory to your app. These custom health checks can be implemented with a health microflow. The big benefit of our whole platform is that we have much more monitoring metrics available at all levels of an app as opposed to tied together solutions with monitoring components segregated from development components. This is heaven for DevOps or SysOps teams. Now there is domain specific information available at your fingertips. This enables teams to rapidly respond to problems that arise, without the burden of having to find the root cause first. Now you see not only user input adds value to solid application lifecycle management, but also a well conceived monitoring system.
All of the monitoring information (see below) can be scoped by day, week, month or year.
For the last few weeks we’ve been posting Mendix 3.0 feature focused blogs describing ways to enable tight collaboration between business and IT. The Feedback Mechanism and Version Control both facilitate ‘Agile Application Life Cycle Management’ and are tied together with Team Server. It’s now possible to combine requirements, implementation and feedback, all with the Team Server. In other words, each application phase is becoming more and more connected to the next, making planning, developing, deploying, and managing applications a truly seamless process.
The Team Server connects sprintr to the AppFactory so that user stories are directly connected to respective forms, for example. Continue on to the next application phase, where you’re application is deployed and automatically gathering feedback from end users, and those feedback tickets can be easily sorted and turned into new user stories for your next sprint. See the cycle?
Let’s break it down with some screenshots:
The first thing you do is enable Team Server in the Business Modeler™ when starting a new project.
Team Server is offered as a plugin for sprintr, making it possible to include a versioned model repository in your project so you can update, commit changes and merge model versions in your project. There are two things that make sprintr and Team Server of great value for collaboration:
First, there is a clear overview of the history of your model, so everybody knows what changes have been applied in real-time.
Second, the Team Server gathers and displays data in a way that links Business with IT:
This means that if a user wants to have a form changed you can navigate instantly from the user story to the desired form to make that change, or if a user want to have a whole view changed it’s possible to jump right from the user story to the view in the Business Modeler and modify it instantly. This is actually what is going on behind the scenes on step six of our previous post about feedback.
To see this live in action:
Last week, we showed you the Mendix Feedback Cycle, with Sprintr; a vital part of Agile Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). This week, we bring you another important part of ALM - Transport Workflow. This functionality enables DevOps teams to easily transport apps from development environments to test-, acceptance- and production environments.
Change and release management should be as easy and quick as possible because true agile teams will change Apps constantly based upon new user input and evolving business requirements. We wanted a simple system to manage the “App Jungle” – often complex, with applications constantly switching between environments. Because now (as Ron Tolido of Cap Gemini says) “if Applications were People, I’d say most organizations have a lot of Baby Boomers employed right now that yearn for retirement”. We think complex change and release management systems hold back the rapid evolution that applications have to go through nowadays, so we built this process into the Mendix 3.0:
First lets give you an overview of your complete App Jungle:
It’s easy to spot which apps need work, and need to be transported to a different environment; about as easy as reading a traffic light. You’ll also see recent alerts and activity along the left side of the application. Just click on the app and the next screen appears, where you can find details of different versions of the applications (thanks to your dedicated Team Server) and move an app from Acceptance to Production.
To see our workflow live in action please
Boston, USA – August 9, 2011 – The Dutch Protestant Church has been awarded the iCMG Architecture Excellence Award in the ‘IS Security Architecture’ category for a member registration system developed by Mendix.
The prize was awarded due to the high security standards and user authorization structures built into the system. Some of the highlighted system requirements included confidential data and a strict separation of the financial administration and member administration. The prestigious, international prize was awarded during the ‘Architecture World 2011’ conference held recently in Bangalore, India.
The solution enables the Protestant Church to manage activities related to its member registration and administration more effectively, including an integrated contribution administration system. Intended to support church and pastoral visit work, the project has resulted in a significant improvement in the quality of member registration for the Protestant Church. To protect members’ privacy, information in the new system is extensively safeguarded by, among other things, role-based data availability.
Agile Development Approach
Mendix, the leading agile application platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider, began the implementation of the member registration system back in 2009. According to Roald Kruit, Project Leader at Mendix, the agile approach applied to the project enabled the team to build a system that will continuously be able to meet the Protestant Church’s needs.
“Thanks to the agile nature of the platform, we were able to easily cope with changing circumstances and requirements throughout the development process,” said Kruit. “This enabled us to benefit from progressive insights.”
Henry Kieskamp, ICT Manager of the Protestant Church’s service organization, sees the prize as a confirmation of the high-quality system that is currently at his organization’s disposal: “We are hugely satisfied with the system as it is now. The security aspect is very important for us, with a view to ensuring the privacy of our members and preventing abuse. Among other things, we implemented this via internal partitioning or the mutual shielding of data. It is great to win a prize specifically for an aspect that is so important for us. The positive evaluation by this independent jury is a type of quality mark for the security of this member registration system.”
About the Protestant Church
The Protestant Church in the Netherlands has approximately 2.1 million members who are members of one of the over 1,800 local districts. For more information: www.pkn.nl.
Mendix 3.0 has plenty of new features worth discussing, particularly its built-in feedback mechanism. Many of the new features are meant to keep applications up to speed with constantly changing business demands; that’s how Mendix facilitates agile application lifecycle management. One of the key elements of business agility and meeting complex business demands is the ability to respond to change. That’s where our new feedback mechanism comes in: collaboration between business and IT. Let’s break it down into 7 steps:
When you start building a new app in Mendix, make sure to enable Team Server so that your development team can collaborate with business end-users easily. Keeping business users involved throughout the project may seem overwhelming, but don’t worry – sprintr will keep their input organized and prioritized.
Download the feedback widget from the Mendix AppStore and configure it within your Business Modeler. It will give your app this intuitive feedback button on every page.
Users of your application, including those on the development team, can click the feedback button to provide their input. These feedback tickets will have all the meta data you’ll need to properly assess business (or development) needs.
Feedback tickets can be accepted and added to your backlog, rejected to ask for more information, or ignored if its a known issue.
Feedback tickets that uncover new requirements for the project can be made new tasks or user stories in the appropriate upcoming sprintr. This is how the feedback mechanism continues to evolve your application – if you didn’t gather this feedback now, it might turn into a real headache later on.
Now when you’re modeling the application in the Business Modeler, your new feedback inspired user story will be shown underneath your development environment. You can even double click the user story to jump directly to the form it’s associated with.
To keep the feedback issuer informed on your progress with their input; let them know by changing the feedback ticket from ‘Running’ to ‘Done’. They’ll only get an email if they checked off the ‘please keep me updated’ box when submitting feedback – they’ll be happy to see the progress.
For more information: Request a live demo!
