Press

Company adds Gottfried Sehringer to executive leadership to advance growing market interest in Mendix App Platform

BOSTON – May 16, 2012 – Mendix, the app platform company for the enterprise, announced today that it has named Gottfried Sehringer as Vice President of Worldwide Marketing.

Sehringer joins the Mendix team with a highly successful track record in the global software market, including senior marketing roles at SAP, Maconomy and Softrax Corporation. Most recently he served as Chief Marketing Officer of SmartBear Software, Inc., where he built a high-volume, high-velocity marketing model.

In his role at Mendix, Sehringer will be responsible for solidifying the Mendix brand as a global leader in the enterprise app platform market, and leading the company’s product marketing, social media, communications and marketing program initiatives.

“Mendix is a true leader with immense potential in the quickly evolving app platform market,” said Sehringer. “I am excited about being part of the Mendix team and to help more and more companies learn about the tremendous time-to-market and cost benefits the Mendix App Platform delivers.”

“We are thrilled to have Gottfried on our executive team,” said Derek Roos, CEO of Mendix. “Mendix is poised to lead the industry in the coming years and Gottfried’s market vision, experience and drive will help us bring the Mendix story to a much larger audience and accelerate our market success.”

Newsflash – the Spring 2012 release of the Mendix App Platform is just around the corner. Slated for late May, the new Mendix App Platform will become more integrated, more social and more comprehensive than ever before. It will also include some killer new features that will make you more productive the minute you use it and help you create apps your users will love.

Did we make you curious? More to come on this blog as we are readying the release. One hint: Get your mobile phones ready – building mobile enterprise apps will never be the same…

Accelerated time-to-market and affordable delivery of exact functionality needed by business users gives Stream Group substantial competitive edge and exceeds customers’ expectations

BOSTON & LONDON – April 19, 2012 – Mendix, a leading provider in the application platform-as-a-service (aPaaS) market, announced exceptional business growth and customer success among its expanding partner channel. U.K. software development specialist Stream Group has seen an annual increase in Mendix-based development revenues of more than 50-percent. Within just two years, the Mendix platform has come to represent 80-percent of Stream’s business.

Stream Group provides custom software development services for start-ups, SMBs and large corporate organizations requiring the rapid roll-out of timely business solutions.

“Mendix is ideally suited to customers who aren’t able to fully specify their requirements upfront,” explains Paul Jewell, Stream’s managing director. “By combining rapid application development with user collaboration, the platform allows us to model an early version of the solution that can be used as the basis for feedback.”

Stream describes Mendix as ‘the third way’ to develop software. “Previously, organizations had to choose between off-the-shelf software and traditional bespoke solutions built using tools like Java or .Net,” Paul says.

“With off-the-shelf products, companies could be paying for functionality they’d never use, but would have to customize the software to get what they needed, leading to support and upgrade issues. Traditional custom solutions on the other hand would require large teams, take a long time and incur a lot of time and risk,” he explains. “Software developed using Mendix gives businesses everything they need and no more, and can be done quickly with a small development team, resulting in modest costs – with very little risk because users are involved at every stage.”

One of Stream’s most recent successes has been a project for Freedom Food, the RSPCA’s farm assurance and food labeling scheme. The organization wanted to web-enable its core business systems so that farm assessors and customers could look up their own schedules and the status of applications, certificates or payments, relieving the demands on back-office staff. Based on its work with the Mendix App Platform, Stream was able to deliver a working solution within three months using just a couple of developers. “If Freedom Food had taken the approach used to develop the original business system, the process would have taken more than a year,” Paul notes.

“Mendix has been a phenomenal boost to our business,” he concludes. “I’ve been building software for 30 years and it’s fantastic to see the smile on customers’ faces when you exceed their expectations. Development using the Mendix platform takes typically just a quarter of the time usually allocated to projects, which makes a huge difference when trying to address a business’s most urgent needs.”

Commenting on the partnership John Milway, UK country manager at Mendix, said, “We are delighted at Stream’s success and are proud to be such an integral part of what they’ve achieved.”

About Stream Group
Stream Group provides robust, high-quality, robust solutions to businesses that have become disillusioned with the time, cost and pain of bespoke software development. Stream specialises in building solutions that work in weeks, not months; that only need small teams; that do what the business needs now; and that allow for low cost of ownership – by making applications easy to maintain, without relying on expensive, niche resources. For more information please visit http://thestreamgroup.com/

Software industry veteran Loek van den Boog joins Mendix as company accelerates growth in the enterprise cloud platform market

BOSTON – April 2, 2012 – Mendix, Inc. today announced the appointment of former Oracle executive Loek van den Boog as Chairman of the Board of Directors. Van den Boog is a highly regarded software industry veteran, leading and advising global technology companies including Patni, Cordys, General Atlantic and Oracle in a career that has spanned over three decades.

On the heels of record, triple-digit growth in 2011, Mendix is positioned to challenge the enterprise software industry with a comprehensive platform for application delivery and management in the cloud. Where large organizations were once limited to out-of-the-box software or custom code, Mendix provides a new option for those organizations needing to build and deploy applications quickly and without complex coding, while working seamlessly with existing in-house legacy systems and enterprise applications like Oracle, Microsoft or SAP.

“In my 25 years in the enterprise software industry, I have seen many organizations struggle with the ever-growing pressure to advance their business in a timely and cost effective way. Mendix has struck that nerve with an innovative solution – the Mendix cloud platform, which is changing the way enterprise apps are built and deployed, providing tremendous ROI and time-to-market advantages for our customers,” said van den Boog about Mendix’s growth strategy. “We have an exceptionally strong team, an immense market need and a compelling strategy. I’m excited to join the company in this endeavor.”

Mendix CEO Derek Roos is delighted to welcome the new chairman, “it’s a privilege to have Loek join the team and help us achieve our strategic goals. The Mendix cloud platform for enterprise apps is key for many organizations, and Loek’s vast knowledge of the enterprise software market will be vital to our continued global success. I look forward to working with him as we change the way people think about business applications.”

Loek van den Boog is a software industry executive, independent consultant and private investor, and has held various board and executive management positions over the past 25 years. Most recently he served as executive director and interim CEO at Patni Computer Systems, Ltd. Previously, van den Boog was CEO of Cordys and Meta4, a special advisor for General Atlantic Partners, and senior vice president of EMEA for Oracle Corporation.

The past few weeks have been a busy time for Mendix engineers in the Life Science industry. It’s always interesting to learn new ways that various organizations are using the platform; clearly those with an immediate need find the more remarkable use cases. I thought I’d take this week’s post to channel a few of these into a blog post for the rest of the community.

Compliance is a top priority for Life Sciences, and Mendix offers a solution to fast changing regulations that appears to be second to none. Legal departments quickly realize the ticking time bomb they need to diffuse when millions of dollars are at risk, and regulatory compliance is one area where Mendix can literally save millions and cost next to nothing.

The Top Layer Defense

One enormous (read: subject to millions in possible penalties) pharmaceutical company is using Mendix as a top layer to harness data from various underlying systems, and quickly build the reporting apps they need on the fly.

I thought this was a pretty neat way of taking advantage of Mendix’s integration capabilities – the VP of Regulatory Compliance I spoke with had piloted Mendix with one compliance app and is now rolling it out as a catch-all for new Life Science regulations. She told me that regulations and reporting guidelines are constantly being changed, and having something in place that’s flexible and malleable enough to handle these various requirements gave her “a strong defense in her battle against fines and fees.”

The EUDA Migrator

There are a lot of big companies out there relying on End User Developed Apps (EUDAs) to manage alarmingly important data. Typically built as complex Excel workbooks or Access databases, these high-risk-low-cost apps create a single point of failure, a technical reliance on their creator, and in most cases – a headache to break apart and recreate in a more enterprise-friendly manner.

That’s where we started our conversation with one COO of a medium sized medical device organization. He was adamant about getting rid of the End User Developed Apps at his organization that had been in use for almost a decade. For these, we executed a quick two week project to combine, replace, migrate (and even extend) three apps of various sizes and functions. All of which held a similar responsibility when it came time to generate reports for the government. He’s happy with his new portal – it provides him access to all the Excel and Access apps he had been handling via email, even from his smartphone. This was simple app in Mendix with a huge impact on their future scalability and agility.

Like I said, when faced with compliance issues – few solutions combine the speed and cost that engineers can achieve with Mendix. For anyone who’s looking for a long term solution to compliance requirements – now you know where to go.

We work with companies to help them jump-start their business agility and give IT departments the tools and know-how to enable business change. Over the years we’ve made it a best practice to take advantage of any previous investments our customers have made in order to provide a significant ROI. It’s part of our mission – to give companies a platform on which they can build great software that adds real business value fast. I thought I would take a few minutes to outline common ways we use Mendix as a change layer on top of rigid systems to leverage these investments.

The Agile Change Layer

If you’re sick and tired of missing out on valuable business opportunities because you’re not fast enough, or they cost too much, that’s where your agile change layer comes in. We like to think of it as a CIO’s magic net to catch those opportunities that are moving too fast for traditional methods of application delivery. In this use case Mendix sits on top of any and all existing systems, using web services to grab data as need to provide a way to build apps that capture those opportunities in days instead of months.

Integration with SAP

SAP is incredibly powerful enterprise software; it’s no question why Gartner reports that they have a quarter of the ERP market. Thousands of companies have spent millions on their SAP roll-outs over the past decade, leaving less than affordable options to modify those systems with today’s constricted IT budgets. In these situations, customers buy a relatively affordable Mendix license to inject some flexibility into their IT landscape.

Mendix is certified to integrate with SAP NetWeaver, giving you the ability to unlock data from the underlying system and display it in an modifiable Mendix app. New business value exists in your ability to adapt applications quickly – not ripping and replacing your whole system. Pulling data from SAP NetWeaver allows you to get the most out of those capital expenditures from yesteryear, and even renew value by adding functionality or serving new users (like the ones in your supply chain for example).

Integration with Microsoft Dynamics

Another common integration scenario is with Microsoft Dynamics. Here’s a technology that has left quite a few companies up in arms when it comes to adopting cloud computing. One of our partners, Navigator Technologies, goes as far as to say “The Mendix platform offers the fastest, most efficient way to extend Microsoft Dynamics NAV.” These customers want flexible web applications and have an extremely limited number of options when their IT budgets can’t support otherwise drastic measures required.

Just like SAP, it’s simply a matter of unlocking underlying data from the systems existing data layer and delivering it through Mendix apps, which hold all the forms, logic, and user interface. Cost savings here are tremendous, especially with the controllable cost structure that a subscription PaaS provides.

The name of the game here is business value through adaptability – and that business value has a cost that we keep to a minimum by leveraging existing systems. These are just a few integration scenarios that pop up all the time here at Mendix. We pride ourselves on our platforms virtually limitless integration capabilities, and its ability to create value for our customers. Check out the CIO Playbook for more Mendix best practices for achieving more with less.

According to InformationWeek, the top three priorities for Chief Information Officers in the United States are (in a few words) budget, collaboration, and speed. The article I’m referring to gives a great overview of the top ten CIO priorities, but I think my keyboard might burst into flames if I have to reiterate the business case for cloud computing one more time. So let’s jump to the front of the priorities and get to the bottom of this executive wish list.

No. 3: Break out of the 80/20 spending trap
Here in the US, our enterprises have been in investing in heavy technology for a few decades – and by investing, I mean amassing enormous systems with million dollar price tags and dribbling ROIs. The modern CIO is not at fault of course – 15 million dollar ERP systems were once a dramatic differentiator for large companies – it is, however, their problem now.

Preston explains that budgets are flat and when 80% is spent on maintaining existing systems, growth initiatives that promise real business value tend to lose their steam. Navigating the way from 80/20 to 50/50 requires a long term strategy, but today’s CIO knows that investing time into balancing costs is a better bet than any single system. The ability to derive quantifiable business value from IT activities brings us to our next CIO priority…

No. 2: Make IT one with the business
IT is here to support strategic business goals – and even if the rest of the company sees the IT group as Level 8 Dungeon Masters, these folks have more concentrated innovation power than the rest of the company combined. The modern CIO knows this, and according to Preston, 45 percent of InformationWeek 50 companies cited “introducing new IT-led products and services” among the top three ways they plan to innovate with technology this year.

There are a few ways to make IT ‘one with the business’ – at Mendix, we prefer to connect the project team to end users through a feedback button on web apps. We also invite every stakeholder we can to the Sprintr party (er.. project) and collaborate and co-create until the application is aligned with business, their goals, and their user stories.

No. 1: IT is too darn slow (and needs to get faster)
And at the center of it all, there’s speed. Where marketing and HR initiatives take 3 months, IT initiatives take 12. Large enterprises have grown accustomed to this, and while [almost] everyone has great ideas, CIO’s make decisions based on their team’s ability to implement them. Losing out on business opportunities due to unsuccessful projects or unattainable launch dates is one of the biggest pains that Mendix resolves for CIOs.

American Express CIO Toby Redshaw comments “Small agile beats big slow—big agile beats everything.” I tend to agree with him, and having witnessed Mendix make adopting agile an easy and natural progression, our users can create highly adaptable applications faster than most IT teams write requirements. Speed enables CIOs to focus on business-value creation instead of operational maintenance. This results in business-IT alignment, and that’s the buzz word of the decade for modern CIOs.

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