Mendix Press

Mendix grows partner network as application delivery PaaS market heats up

BOSTON – February 22, 2012 – Mendix, a leader in the application delivery Platform-as-a-Service market, has signed a partnership agreement with Persistent Systems (BSE & NSE: PERSISTENT), the leader in outsourced software product development (OPD) services. The partnership highlights the growing interest from systems integrators and solution providers in rapid software delivery strategies that can provide them with a competitive edge to win new projects.

Mendix enables organizations with the ability to respond to new opportunities and adapt to new business requirements quickly. The platform utilizes visual modelling to build business applications without code and a social collaboration application called Sprintr to facilitate end user involvement and agile project management. The resulting applications are easily modified, extended, and integrated to satisfy ever-changing business requirements.

Persistent Systems has been an innovation partner for the world’s largest technology brands, leading enterprises and pioneering start-ups. Adopting the Mendix platform will enable Persistent Systems to bolster their reputation with highly agile rapid application delivery.

Adam Clay, Mendix VP of Sales for North America, has high expectations for the partnership. “Persistent Systems has an incredible reputation around the world for being fast and innovative. It’s gratifying to see them adopt Mendix with open arms; their customers are going to love the responsiveness that Persistent Systems will be able to achieve.”

Hari Haran, President of Persistent Systems, Inc. further added, “We are pleased to partner with Mendix. Product development is our DNA and it is also a critical differentiator for our customers. In order to enhance the value of our customers’ IT investment, it is important for us to adopt agile methodologies and applications. With the Mendix platform, we continue to accelerate our development cycle to deliver high quality scalable products.”

About Persistent Systems

Established in 1990, Persistent Systems (BSE & NSE: PERSISTENT) is a global company specializing in software product development services.  For more than two decades, Persistent has been an innovation partner for the world’s largest technology brands, leading enterprises and pioneering start-ups. With a global team of 6,700+ employees, Persistent has 300+ customers spread across North America, Europe, and Asia. Today, Persistent focuses on developing best-in-class solutions in four key next-generation technology areas: Cloud Computing, Mobility, BI & Analytics, Collaboration across technology, telecommunications, life sciences, consumer packaged goods, banking & financial services and healthcare verticals. For more information, please visit: www.persistentsys.com.

Triple-digit growth attributed to international expansion and an increasing market need for faster and easier business application delivery

BOSTON – Feb 7, 2012 – Mendix, a global leader in the Application Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) market, has concluded another year of triple-digit growth as enterprises strive to deliver highly adaptable applications to business units.

The Mendix Agile Business Platform helps companies become much more flexible in responding to business change, by enabling them to rapidly deploy new business apps that extend, modernize and migrate existing systems that are too rigid to support ever changing business requirements. Resulting solutions can then be deployed in the cloud, on mobile devices or locally at the customer’s site.

New license sales grew by more than 400% in 2011, with increased traction in both the US and EU markets. A rapidly expanding partner channel, an injection of new venture capital, and an extended product set contributed significantly to what has been the company’s biggest growth year to date.

Product announcements in 2011 included the launch of Mendix 3.0, a complete and integrated Platform-as-a-Service solution to easily design, develop, deploy, integrate, share and manage business applications. The release includes Sprintr.com, a free social project collaboration space, as well as an enterprise Cloud Portal, for governing deployments centrally and monitoring Mendix Apps in the Cloud.

Mendix’s on-going success was recently acknowledged by the closing of a $13 million Series A round led by Prime Ventures. This latest round will be used to continue global expansion and maintain product leadership. During the year, Mendix expanded its executive team at the company’s new global headquarters in Boston’s Innovation District.

Derek Roos, CEO of Mendix, attributes the company’s rapid growth to an intensifying need among organizations to shorten time to market of new business initiatives, while leveraging data and investments in existing systems. “Too often, the majority of IT resources are absorbed by rigid and expensive ERP/CRM systems, leaving little time for innovation.”

“Our growth is closely tied to Mendix’s ability to address the needs of businesses looking to deliver applications faster and easier. We have set very aggressive goals for 2012, with a particular focus on international expansion, as well as R&D to continue to deliver market-defining innovations. We are planning some exciting releases that I believe will further strengthen our leadership position in this space.”

Minerva, Combine and Internet Light Industries embrace the Mendix Agile Business Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solution to cost-effectively add new value for customers

BOSTON  – January 10, 2012 – Mendix, a leader in the PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) market, has signed three new channel partners, further highlighting the growing interest from systems integrators and solution providers in rapid software development strategies, providing them with a competitive edge to win new projects.

Combine, Minerva Computer Services and Internet Light Industries (ILI) have each embraced the Mendix Agile Business Platform in recent weeks, based on the recognition that meeting clients’ rapidly-changing business requirements demands a new approach to application design and delivery.

Combine provides SAP-based business solutions including implementation, upgrade and integration. Combine recognises the potential that the Mendix platform offers as a way to rapidly deliver and complete complex SAP implementations, including delivering those functions that often fall outside of a typical implementation, yet deliver highest user value and satisfaction. This blend of Mendix and SAP know-how will enable businesses to maximise their investment in SAP and in turn deliver on its full potential.

Minerva Computer Services is one of the foremost resellers of business software and network services to SMEs in the south of England, providing best-of-breed solutions in the areas of accounting and business management, customer relationship management, service management, retail and manufacturing, across a wide range of industry sectors. Minerva is skilled in using modern development platforms which it uses to develop bespoke extensions to ‘out-of-the-box’ software for its clients. Its strategic partnership with Mendix takes this approach to the next level, accelerating Minerva’s speed to market with relevant solutions for its customers.

A third partner, Scotland’s Web innovation company Internet Light Industries, is using the Mendix PaaS to deliver broch, its new Life Management Hub, a web-based product that puts consumers at the centre of their digital information and gives them the ability to manage and use it effectively. As a Mendix user, ILI quickly saw the technology’s broader potential and signed up to become a partner in order to help other start-up technology businesses achieve similar time and cost savings with their own development projects.

Mendix solutions have great relevance to the channel today because they can be deployed extremely quickly and cost-effectively. A recent article in Computer Reseller News (http://www.channelweb.co.uk/crn-uk/opinion/2117455/agile) highlighted the value of agile development strategies for systems integrators and IT resellers. In the article, John Milway, UK country manager at Mendix, notes that agile techniques and technologies are “all about fast feedback to the business” – in contrast to traditional monolithic software coding where benefits aren’t realised until the product is complete – by which time the original requirements may have changed.

“With agile development, requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organising, cross-functional teams,” Milway notes. “This promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary development and delivery, and encourages rapid and flexible response to change. This is in heavy contrast to a highly regulated, regimented, micromanaged model of development known as ‘waterfall’.”

Global life science organizations now have a solution to address strict government reporting guidelines

BOSTON – December 13, 2011 – Mendix, the leading business-driven application development platform, today announced the addition of an Aggregate Spend Portal App in its community driven AppStore. The app is used by global life science organizations under strict, yet unpredictable, government requirements to report aggregate spend on health care professionals (HCPs) as of 2013 per the Physician Payments Sunshine Act.

In order to avoid costly fees associated with errors in reporting, life science organizations will have to begin collecting aggregate spend data throughout 2012. These reports require multiple, disparate systems to integrate and validate HCP spend, creating a difficult information technology task for legal counsel and compliance teams not used to dealing with such issues.

“Mendix applications have been shown to quickly extend existing systems with custom top-layer functionality. This template allows life science companies to have a pre-built, customizable solution to address their federal reporting needs in two to four weeks with minimal IT involvement,” said Mendix’s Vincent de la Mar, who works directly with North American life science companies. “Federal reporting guidelines are frequently changing and evolving, making ease of adaptability a key requirement for the Aggregate Spend Portal App.”

Several organizations have already taken advantage of Mendix’s built-to-change applications in order to comply with the Physicians Spend Sunshine Act, finding the platform to be particularly suited for fast and adaptable compliance reporting solutions. While Mendix has predominantly focused on supporting mission critical applications and transactional portals, representatives familiar with the matter are praising the platforms virtually limitless integration possibilities and unrivalled speed as the ‘silver bullet’ to compliance solutions.

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.”

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.”

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.

Telecommunications company signs three year license extension for the Mendix Agile Business Platform

BOSTON – September 20, 2011 – Mendix, the leading application platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider, today announced that Eurofiber, a top provider of fiber-optic connections, Ethernet and optical transmissions in the Netherlands, has extended its license with Mendix for an additional three years.

The Mendix Agile Business Platform enables Eurofiber to manage and modify its business applications in response to changing market conditions quickly and at low cost. Eurofiber’s self-service portal, a Mendix web app, allows its customers to configure their orders or upgrade their services quickly and easily.

“Deploying Mendix in the cloud was a fast and easy process.  Because of the role we play in the cloud market, it is important for us to enjoy and highlight the benefits of the cloud,” said Wim Turksma, Customer Experience IT manager of Eurofiber.  “Eurofiber is in a dynamic, growing market and we need to be able to respond quickly to changing conditions. Development time with Mendix is three to five times faster than with other platforms and it also allows us to adopt business rules easily. Additionally, the learning curve for developers is significantly shorter.”

Managing over 25% of internet traffic and 50% of all mobile communications traffic throughout the Netherlands, Eurofiber was recently named the “Best Managed Company” by Deloitte, and the company is also on Deloitte’s “Fast 50″ list. The company offers industry-leading network services to organizations, both directly and as a provider of white-label products via Internet and mobile providers.

“As we continue to expand our platform’s capabilities, we are very pleased to extend our partnership with Eurofiber,” said Derek Roos, CEO of Mendix. “Their renewal is another example of the tangible business benefits experienced by our customers.  It is extremely satisfying to see Mendix enable our customers to quickly respond to business change and achieve success using the Agile Business Platform.”

About Eurofiber

Eurofiber is a specialized provider of Managed Dark Fiber connectivity, Ethernet-services from 10 Mbps and Optical Transmission Services up to 400 Gbps. The Eurofiber network now covers more than 10,000 km and grows continuously. More than 25% of all internet traffic and 50% of all mobile communication traffic in The Netherlands is transported via Eurofiber’s fiber optic network.

Eurofiber stands for freedom to choose and headroom to grow. That gives organizations the freedom to decide for themselves how to use the connections and to choose their own service providers. Our finely meshed network, the broad product range and the possibility to increase the bandwidth at any moment, gives organizations the headroom to grow and benefit from new ways of working. Eurofiber has won the Technology Fast50 Award for fast-growing technology companies and was awarded the title ‘Best Managed Companies’ in an annual competition, organised by Deloitte in co-operation with Nyenrode Business University, the Chamber of Commerce, VNO-NCW and Management Team.

Specialized development firm partners with Mendix to expand and integrate custom applications with Microsoft Dynamics NAV

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 7^th 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.

Protestant Church wins iCMG Architecture Excellence Award for member registration system powered by Mendix

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.