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’.”

Here’s what to do to fix the glitches in your site within five minutes:

1. Get a sprintr account if you haven’t already
2. Paste a little code snippet in your head tag (like you -or your webmaster- did for Google Analytics)
3. Put the ID of a specific ‘website’ sprintr project into the code
4. Tweak the code: You can tweak the code to enable attachments, detect usernames and many more options to collect the tightest metadata possible

I’ll bet the minute you start using the widget you will get suggestions for improvements you could never think about for yourself. We use it for Mendix.com as well and within days we had great input…

• “Where can I find the Mendix Whitepaper” (so we made it very apparent on the product page now)
• “Your email states the event is on date X, while the site states the event is on date Y.”
• “Just finished watching the video on SAP integration, do you have one like that for Microsoft Dynamics?”

The feedback widget makes Sprintr different than any other project management tool out there. For the first time, you and your end users can collaborate in real time through your website or application.

Somewhere just after Thanksgiving everyone in my family receives a kind reminder from my aunt asking us to fill out her wonderful Excel spreadsheet decorated with colored columns with our names and what we plan on bringing. Sure enough every year my wife and I fill the spreadsheet out with something only to have it returned to us saying, “Your cousin has already signed up for bringing this.” or “We don’t need that this year.”, now this is all well and good but it got me to thinking. I work with an application development platform every day that I know I am going to explain the wonders of to one of these people at this party. Wouldn’t it be a lot easier for my poor aunt to have a web application?

So with a few clicks of the mouse I was off, I made a data model that included all of two entities (person and item), I made an association so that a person could belong to multiple items, and then I made three forms. About fifteen minutes later I had myself a nice little application, I then stole the styling package from an existing application and threw it into my project folder. My next step was Microsoft Word where I made this little gem:

I then went into the style and changed my customer’s logo to this image and I was ready! With five more clicks I had my application in the cloud. I’ve since added some Excel import functionality (I’d hate to see my aunt’s hard work go to waste) and Google maps so everyone knows how to get to the party. All in all in under an hour I eliminated many hours of effort for my aunt. Plus now I have a basis to tell everyone what I do. Now I just need to figure out how to explain to people that it’s not just Christmas party planning applications that I build…

One of the more notable benefits of Mendix 3.1 is that merging has been made more intuitive and powerful. You can now see which revisions have been merged before, and revert deleted documents, folders and modules, allowing seamless collaboration within a project team.

Another big step forward with Mendix 3.1 is error messaging and sanity checks. We now allow you (and us) to diagnose problems earlier and more specifically, making user feedback even more actionable for development teams. We are fully aware that the dialogue between an end user and a project team should be as flawless as possible.

Also important to note is that version numbering has changed and 3.1.0 is a minor release. You can read our tech-tip blog post to learn how we number our versions from now on.

There is a lot more included in this release. Check out the release notes in the Support Portal for a complete overview.

Managing Director of Benelux Arno Rood Introducing Mendix (in Dutch):

Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions about Mendix:

Questions by the audience:

Please make an appointment with our Sales Team if you have in depth questions about Mendix:

Mendix Essentials review

As our seats for the Mendix Essentials tend to run out fast, make sure to sign up quickly for the next edition on january 27.

Some nice new shortcuts:

• Ctrl+ G: find and go to an item
• Ctrl + Left arrow and Ctrl + Right arrow: move data grid columns, search fields, buttons, tab pages and more in the form editor
• Ctrl+Enter: Ok / Close any form in the modeler

New features:

• When the number of rows in a datagrid is set to more than 20 (e.g. 50), the grid is shown in the modeler with 20 rows and the remark (30 more rows) in the bottom left of the grid. This saves time scrolling and searching in certain forms:
• Enable and disable breakpoints without restarting.
• When duplicating documents, the duplicate is opened automatically for editing instead of accidentally editing the original form.
• “Insert new above selected” when adding an attribute. Great when you have large entities.
• Give microflow actions a background color. This is useful for complex microflows. For example:”make error handling flows red.

Thanks to Frans Verschoor for starting a great topic in the Mendix community.

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

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.”