Today, we announced support for Microsoft Azure and the availability of the Mendix platform in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.

Before I get into the details of what we released and how to get started, I want to provide some context. Whether driven by their own ambition or threat of disruption, organizations across industries are making digital transformation their #1 priority. According to IDC, by the end of 2017, two-thirds of CEOs will have digital transformation at the center of their corporate strategy.

But as Mendix CEO Derek Roos points out in today’s announcement, “The apps of the future cannot be built with the tools of the past.” To keep pace with growing innovation demands and successfully transform their businesses, IT teams need a modern cloud stack that enables much greater speed, agility, insight and scale than traditional technologies are capable of providing. This seamless cloud stack is exactly what our partnership with Microsoft delivers.

With Mendix’s rapid application development capabilities, business and IT can collaborate across the full application lifecycle, working in short, iterative cycles to build innovative web, mobile and IoT applications. Developers can now seamlessly leverage Azure for instant provisioning, deployment and scaling of their Mendix applications. They can also take advantage of Azure’s broad portfolio of component services and algorithms to help make those applications more intelligent and contextually aware.

If you’re an existing Azure user, there’s more: [tweet_dis]The Mendix Pro Edition is now available as an Virtual Machine in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace[/tweet_dis]. To do this, we built a solution running Mendix on top of Postgres that’s accessible over SSL using nginx. This means that you can utilize Mendix seamlessly within your existing Microsoft Azure setup and account, and run your own Mendix server on Azure for an hour, day, week, or even a year.

Here’s an overview of how you can get started and deploy your first Mendix app on Azure:

  1. Add Mendix from the Azure Marketplace – Select the version you want to deploy. We offer 50, 100, and 250 app user bundles. Step through the wizard to set up the deployment environment and provision the VM.
  2. Create a Deployment Package – In the Mendix Business Modeler, you can either build a new application or open the projectyou want to run on Azure. We have a number of sample apps in our community App Store, such as Company Expenses. Once you’re ready to deploy, simply create a deployment package.
  3. Upload the Deployment Package to Azure – Upload the deployment package to the Azure runtime deployment portal and deploy and run your app on your Mendix image. Voila! It’s that easy to deploy a Mendix app on Azure.

Coming Together to Drive Digital Innovation

Companies need digital innovation to survive, which means they need to become more productive and agile in their software delivery. Cloud platforms like Azure are part of the answer: they make application deployment and operations faster, self-service, and way more efficient. The other half of the answer is model-driven rapid application development platforms like Mendix. They enable innovative web, mobile and IoT apps to be built much more quickly and flexibly than traditional approaches.

Bringing these capabilities together in one seamless cloud stack enables enterprises to achieve lightning-quick time to market and continuous delivery of scalable, multi-channel apps. This powerful combination is key to unleashing a tidal wave of digital innovation.