BOSTON & ROTTERDAM, NETHERLANDS – July 6, 2011 – Mendix, the leading application platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider, today announces a partnership with Westernacher, a global business and IT consulting firm. The global partnership will provide Westernacher with the ability to simplify business-IT collaboration for their diverse client-base.

Westernacher’s vast SAP client-base will benefit from the agile platform’s established SAP certification. Its off-the-shelf SAP integration capabilities make it easy to extend highly complex environments, such as SAP. Westernacher will help Mendix reach these global clients and be able to simplify collaboration between business and IT.

“We have seen many SAP customers in need of extension and customization. Westernacher will be able to quickly and cost effectively add immense value to their SAP customer base with our platform,” said Derek Roos, CEO of Mendix.

Westernacher has broad expertise in several vertical market segments and numerous business applications; and the Mendix Agile Business Platform will be used to extend and renew value in the existing legacy systems for the company’s customers.

“Mendix will allow us to offer our clients a complete solution for agile application lifecycle management in the cloud, said Christian Wagner, CEO of Westernacher USA. “Using their platform we will be able to rapidly develop, deploy and manage applications that smoothly integrate with our customer’s existing legacy systems, especially our SAP clients.”

About Westernacher

Westernacher is an integrated business and IT consulting firm with a strong SAP practice. Our industry experience combined with our expertise in both business and IT allows us to solve complex problems for our customers in an innovative and successful manner. With over 200 professionals worldwide and offices in Europe, USA and Asia, Westernacher has been a trusted service provider since 1969.  For more information please visit, http://www. westernacher.com

BOSTON – May 31, 2011 – Mendix, the leading agile application platform-as-a-service company, today launches sprintr™, the first social collaboration space dedicated to assisting employees and project teams across the enterprise. Sprintr combines the best of social collaboration and project management tools to facilitate employee engagement and co-creation. Now in beta, project teams no longer have to cope with heavyweight, administrative project management tools.

Sprintr is simple and easy to use; signing-up takes less than 10-seconds using a corporate email address.  After joining, users can create projects, send invitations to fellow stakeholders and start a conversation. Project pages are furnished with a name, description and a logo, and members can stay up-to-date, share and discuss thoughts on a project page.

“Sprintr simplifies the collaboration process by breaking down traditional organizational boundaries,” said Derek Roos, CEO of Mendix. “In most organizations, project teams are geographically dispersed, resulting in inefficient communication, adding complexity to any project. Sprintr eliminates this problem and facilitates true business collaboration online.”

Team members can also establish milestones within projects and use planning tools to manage them. As each milestone is added, completed or changed, team members are notified and kept up-to-date. Sprintr organizes thoughts and ideas so project teams don’t have to.

Faster Feedback, Forever

With sprintr, teams can organize end-user feedback and incorporate it directly into their planning. This user-driven functionality enables teams to get instant feedback and course-correct quickly, resulting in better business practices and happier customers.

For software teams, a feedback widget containing a simple pop-up form can be easily embedded in any website or web-based application. This widget enables teams to get instant user feedback on any application. Stakeholders can then evaluate the feedback, via a built-in voting mechanism and either reject it, put it on hold or add it to the project backlog.

Sprintr can be accessed at, http://www.sprintr.com.

At Mendix, we find that our customers appoint a particular kind of person to work with our products. Sometimes they’re from IT, sometimes they’re a business analyst or project manager – in any case, they practice the skills of both fields. Times are changing, departmental lines are blurring, and a new breed of business superhero has risen: the BE.

The ‘Business Engineer’ – who are they, what do they do, and why you want to know them.

Who

Until now, these men and women of myth have appeared under the guise of your organizational boundaries – half business and half IT. As champions of business modeling, they dance between the ranks of geeks and suits in companies everywhere, aptly increasing business agility at every collaborative junction. With a flash drive dangling from their sports car keychain and first place positions in both Online Poker and Fantasy Baseball, they are what we believe to be the future of the modern business analyst. In this series of blog posts, we attempt to uncover the true nature of this evolved employee…

What

The title of ‘business engineer’ is not completely novel, as it has been used in the past to describe a role similar to that of a business development manager. Under a new light of enterprise software modeling, this term refers to the business analyst on technical steroids – or the IT whiz with a knack for client relations. These skills, once segregated at a basic level of undergraduate education, have merged into a hybrid force of human capital with more creative power than either part could ever fathom.

These collaborative powers can push companies into uncharted profits, as they attribute to the resiliency of a company’s technology. Agility, as readers of this blog know, affords an organization the ability to change with its business environment. The more easily technological change can occur, the faster and more decisive an organization becomes. Charles Darwin says it best: “In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”

The business engineer is not a mythical entity – they may even be sitting in the room as you read this post. Finding them and harnessing their abilities should be a primary goal of any manager. In terms of organizational behavior, they are the ‘central connector.’ In terms of organizational culture, they are the ‘go-to guy.’ And in terms of business agility, they are the binding force between business users and technical experts that have never been able to see eye to eye.

Why

The reasons why you’d want business engineers in your company are significant. They make the technology that your company uses easier to use, more intuitive, and they do so faster and with minimal adversity. With the adoption of visual business modeling, and agile development methodologies, these unsung heroes of the enterprise era are here to stay. Do you know the business engineer at your organization? If not, it just might be you.

I came across this slideshow from CIO Insight a few weeks ago. The aggressive-looking deck attempts to explain why IT projects fail. I’m always a bit weary of headlines that seem this simplistic, but who knows – maybe they thought up some new ways to blow a project that millions of us hadn’t already avoided, accomplished, or observed. Better yet, wouldn’t it be something if we finally figured out how to diminish the “63 billion dollars” worth of failed projects in the US?

Clicking through the deck, I realized that a majority of these reasons are somewhat interconnected. It’s not just lack of detailed requirements, lack of user involvement, scope creep, bad scoping, poor testing, or lack of executive support. An innate segregation between the business people who use the product, the IT people who build the product, and the business analysts who dance in between – is the root cause of most of these problems.

Enhance Collaboration, Improve Requirements

The logical solution to these failure-inducing practices is visual modeling. By using visual models, both sides of the IT-Business equation have a valuable representation of what the IT project will encompass. By using this method of collaboration, requirements become more accurate. Business people can visualize the processes that the software will benefit, and IT people have a more functional way of communicating their solution.

The Immediate Feedback Loop

If we take one step further into the initial requirements analysis, these visual models can be deployed as applications for an immediate look into future checkpoints in the project. Imagine the following scenario:

Business Analyst: “So the data from your current ERP system will be aggregated and validated in the new system, which will then report directly to their corresponding contacts from your CRM.”
Client: “Right…”
Business Analyst: “Ok, well this is the model with data flows – and this is what the application will look like to the contact in the CRM system.”
Client: “Wait, that’s not all the data they’re going to need. What about integrating the grant management database?”

[A few clicks, a new form, and deploy.]

Business Analyst: “Okay, so now the window shows the corresponding grants for each contact as well.”

Isn’t immediate feedback fun!? It’s a dream for business analysts that has only recently become a reality (in the Mendix Business Modeler, that is). Mendix users never come close to failing a project because clients know exactly what they’re getting and developers know exactly what is needed. So why are so many IT projects failing? The right tools are out there, it’s only a matter of time before they are discovered.

The community of business analysts in the United States and abroad is taking notice of their impact on the world economy. Not long ago, the idea of a business analyst was new – sitting on the border of technology and business, sharing lunch with both ‘geeks’ and ‘suits,’ and creating value with only the uncanny ability to collaborate between these corporate cultures.

These collaborative colleagues will continue to develop alongside, and in between, new technology and new business.  The growing popularity of agile methodologies and visual modeling software motivated me to put together this deck of five simple steps to a future focused business analyst.

Business Engineering 101

This program brings the Mendix platform to the classroom, allowing business information students to create highly functional applications in no time. The idea here is to find a synergy between brilliant university students and a fast growing software company. Students, in addition to class credit and real world experience, get to try a platform made with business people in mind. By cutting out the endless coding, students can focus on the business problem they’re trying to address and how they can use technology to solve it.

Tomorrow’s Business Analyst

On the other side of the equation, at Mendix we take feedback from students and professors extremely seriously. Mendix University Program manager, Chris Kober, explains: “Todays business information students are the future advocates and users of our products and our platform, their opinions are invaluable to us. Part of the reason we are located in Cambridge is that we have the smartest students in the world within walking distance.”

Ivy League only, for now

Although the program is aimed at Ivy League schools for now, the company plans to grow this initiative indefinitely. Any university offering a degree in information technology or business administration can be a part of the fun, and it usually doesn’t take very long for professors and students to become supporters.

Sign up for a whirlwind tutorial during one of our monthly Mendix Essentials or Webinar sessions, just enough to get your creative juices flowing.

What if it suddenly became very easy for someone to do both your job and their own, at the same time? If history provides any forecast for the future of IT, we are likely to see some interesting changes in the way human capital is managed – especially for those of us involved in the emergence of cloud computing. Clouds push complexity to the background and allow users to focus on what really matters: functionality and costs.

Have you ever noticed how the education we receive often sets boundaries in our career aspirations? We are trained to do something, and do it well – but in doing so, we take for granted the fact that others are doing the same thing in a different field. Then, when we are faced with an inevitable change, we instinctively take a “That’s not what I’ve been trained to do, there are other people for that” mentality. Sure, there are the motivated few who push down boundaries and become renaissance men and women in their own right. But when everyone else is set in their ways, these people are often considered a risk… think: too many eggs in one basket.

Now, to regress from my pseudo-philosophical banter, this trend is becoming all the more apparent as business analysts become more involved in technical training. Most IT veterans would say that business analysts will never have the true know-how to implement their plans, requirements and recommendations. The modern business analyst usually considers themselves more of a problem solver than a programmer – hence the separation of labor in this function of any business. Having surveyed the blogosphere for opinions of business analysts and IT professionals, there seems to be a live (and even a bit emotional) discussion between those who say it is a natural, and therefore inevitable, progression and those who say it is a “pie in the sky” and that it will never happen.

Contrastingly, a growing population of believers has something to say about the segregation of business and IT. In a world of zeros and ones, the innumerable coding languages can only become more and more efficient. As coding languages are continuously created, survival of the fittest can account for the extinct languages of modern programming. An abstraction of these languages is an ongoing phenomenon with a light at the end of the tunnel. Some say that using abstract, visual and human-readable models instead of low-level code is a very important step towards commoditized coding.

I’ve come to think about this abstraction phenomenon as measure to increase efficiency. When our ancestors realized that making bricks was faster than packing sand, they were on to something similar. If someone else uses molds to make perfectly shaped bricks that can be built into any structure, the workers need different skills but can ultimately build more economically, the architect can plan more accurately, and the buyer can move in earlier. So, why deal with sand when we can get the bricks from vendors elsewhere. Why deal with code, when we can get software modules elsewhere? This, my friends, may be the future of today’s business analyst.  In the future, what if business analysts had the skill set and the molds to create bricks that satisfy their requirements without the need to deal with code – or sand?