The Business Agility Blog

Dear friends,

It is with great pleasure and excitement that I write this note to you, our customers, partners, user community and friends. Mendix has signed a $13 million investment round led by Prime Ventures. See here for the press release. We are honored to bring forth a new era for Mendix as we continue to bring innovation and productivity to organizations all over the world.

When we started Mendix as ambitious university students, we set out with a mission to revolutionize the relationship between business & IT. We imagined a world where business apps are delivered in days (not months) and where processes can be changed at the speed of business. We envisioned building a company and a team that would attract, develop and retain the brightest minds in the industry. And we could only dream of opening offices on three continents with partners and customers spreading our message around the globe. Today this is our reality.

Our product has developed significantly over the years, from a high-productivity development tool to a complete agile business platform with a fast-growing user community. Nevertheless our mission to increase the speed and ease of business change is as strong and relevant as ever. You can continue to expect us to keep pushing this frontier.

We thank you for your ongoing support.

Derek Roos
CEO, Co-Founder

Software company to use funds to build out global sales and marketing operations

BOSTON – October 31, 2011 – Mendix (www.mendix.com), a leader in the PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) market, today announced the closing of a $13 million Series A round of financing. The round was led by Prime Ventures, with HENQ Invest following on its earlier seed investment. The investment will support the company’s international expansion and fuel its global sales efforts, building upon its fast growing partner network and user community.

Since its product launch in 2007, Mendix has remained profitable experiencing triple digit revenue growth year over year; acquiring and retaining customers such as GE, Genzyme and TNT. In addition to the funding, Prime Ventures’ Roel de Hoop will join the Board of Directors for Mendix and work alongside the company to help accelerate the global expansion.

“Mendix is at the intersection of several IT trends including PaaS, agile development & app stores.  These trends, combined with their innovative technology and collaborative approach to aligning the business and IT sides of an organization, enable them to deliver real business value to their customers,” said Sake Bosch, managing partner at Prime Ventures. “We are living in an app driven world, where time to market and flexibility to change are key competitive advantages. Mendix is leading this trend, and we are very excited to support them with our experience and network to build a global success.”

The company’s core product, the Mendix Agile Business Platform helps companies rapidly develop, deploy and integrate applications at a fraction of the time of existing tools and platforms. Mendix applications can then be deployed in the cloud, on mobile devices or locally at the customer’s site.

“To date we have always organically achieved triple-digit growth on the results of delivering business value and solving real pain-points for our clients,” said Derek Roos, CEO of Mendix. “Our customers are looking to increase their business agility and turn to Mendix to jump-start their productivity and app deployment. The partnership with Prime comes at the right time for us to accelerate our abilities to meet this demand and act quickly in sales, marketing and product innovation.”

Business challenges solved by Mendix:

• Lack of transparency of intercompany billing
• Funds not being transferred
• Violation fees for not complying with international law

TNT needed an invoicing, re-billing & settlement solution that would automate and streamline the process globally across its more than 200 entities. The existing web-based transaction and invoicing system was not suited to facilitate international billing.

Download full case study

Adam Clay highlights Mendix opportunity in North American enterprise software market

BOSTON – October 19, 2011 – Mendix, the leading agile application platform provider, announced today that Adam Clay has been named Vice President of Sales for North America. Clay joins Mendix after leading Shunra Software to record revenue growth and worldwide expansion.

Clay explains his motivation to join Mendix: “Having worked in technology for 15 years, I’ve observed a fundamentally dysfunctional relationship between business and IT. It’s broken. Everyone’s frustrated – and it starts with the fact that business and IT expectations regarding feasibility and speed are incredibly difficult to align. Unfortunately for most companies, the dysfunction manifests itself in lost revenue, increased cost, and lost productivity. It doesn’t have to be that way, and that’s exactly what Mendix is addressing.”

“It’s a simple, yet revolutionary concept.  The team at Mendix has married the business need for responsiveness and IT’s desire to provide business value quickly into a solution that delivers what is needed most in today’s business climate: agility. And it solves a major problem for businesses today. The Mendix story is one that needs to be told.  My job is to make sure that we are telling that story to everyone.”

“With Adam, we are adding a strong and experienced sales leader to our North American team.” said Derek Roos, CEO of Mendix. “I am looking forward to working with Adam and seeing his contribution to our North American growth.”

Over the past few months, we’ve highlighted several of what we think are the coolest features in Mendix 3.0. While we anxiously await the full release of the renovated platform-as-a-service – here is a quick run-through of those features.

 1. Version Control
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.

2. sprintr Feedback Mechanism
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.

3. Transport Workflow
This functionality enables DevOps teams to easily transport apps from development environments to  test-, acceptance- and production environments.

4. Cloud Based 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.

5. Monitoring & Setting Alerts
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.

Analysts reference Mendix in recent reports citing significant productivity gains and fast returns

BOSTON – October 5, 2011 – Mendix, the leading application platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider, announced today that it has received recognition in three separate Gartner reports. The reports were: 1) IT Market Clock for Application Development, 2011; 2) Hype Cycle for Application Architecture, 2011; and 3) Hype Cycle for Application Development, 2011.

Published by one of the IT industry’s premier analyst firms, the reports forecast Mendix and similar technologies entering a mainstream adoption phase. Mendix had previously been named a “Gartner Cool Vendor.”

The Mendix Agile Business Platform enables business change by simplifying collaboration between business and IT through the use of application development methods cited in the Gartner reports. The IT Market Clock for Application Development specifically stated that application and development managers should be able to see returns in less than 12 months when using such technologies.  “These findings are consistent with the results our customers have seen, and we are obviously pleased to be placed into high impact categories by such a recognized and respected research firm,” said Paul Campaniello, Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at Mendix.

Using the Mendix Agile Business Platform, companies can plan, develop and deploy applications that seamlessly integrate with existing systems at approximately half the cost of traditional software development platforms. These applications can then be deployed in the Mendix cloud or locally at the customer’s site.