In my last blog post, I pointed out the threats hackers pose to small businesses from a security standpoint. This week has been a wild ride in terms of security breaches. First, I read an article on CSO Online that cited a report that found that a “typical Web application gets attacked 137 times in 59 separate days during a... Continue reading

Recently, I came across an article in the Wall Street Journal about hackers stealing money and other information from small businesses and the lawsuits that typically follow from such an ordeal. I am not sure which is worse: the theft of “stuff” (i.e. money, data, information, etc.) or the expense of litigation. Either way, these are costs that can be... Continue reading

Over the past 30 years of supporting our large, loyal customer and partner ecosystem, we have learned few things about building a modern, future-proof application development and deployment platform. We condensed what we learned into seven critical topic areas: Multi-tenancy Security & Compliance User Interface Flexibility Personalization Integration & Workflow Operational Excellence Productivity These topics areas help organize requirements and... Continue reading

As I continue to meet more and more of our customers and partners from all around the world (closing in on almost 1000 accounts now), I am amazed at the wide variety of business applications driving our world today. And it doesn’t matter what industry the business is in (e.g. food service, consumer packaged goods, retail, clothing, manufacturing, construction management,... Continue reading

Brand loyalty is derived from winning the hearts and minds of your customers. It is won by invoking a sense of dedication, passion, and excitement that other products simply can’t provide. You have to turn your customers into brand advocates. When you’ve got brand advocates, they form communities, organize events, and ultimately promote your products and brand for you. Sometimes,... Continue reading

I’ve been traveling quite a bit lately, visiting with hundreds of OpenEdge customers and partners, presenting the latest OpenEdge enhancements and gathering their feedback on the current “state of the application development” world. And along the way I’ve learned a few things that I think are worth sharing. Productivity - Gone are the days of utilizing multiple programs/applications (e.g. BPM)... Continue reading

I recently came across an interesting post on GigaOM: Which is less expensive: Amazon or self-hosted? by Charlie Oppenheimer. The point of the article is to walk through an example that supports his claim that “if you have a significant amount of load that is well known and predictable then you may be able to save some money by bringing... Continue reading

Almost all businesses—large or small—have a need for a comprehensive human resources (HR) program to serve their most valued resources, employees. Leading integrated benefits, payroll and human resources solutions provider Unicorn HRO provides solutions to manage HR processes with greater speed, scope and depth. In the ’80s, Unicorn’s on-premise solution addressed approximately half the target market needs, and they knew... Continue reading

As was mentioned in mid-December, the latest update to our OpenEdge platform is now shipping, and I am pleased to say that it is enabling hundreds of our customers and ISV partners to securely develop and deploy applications across any platform, any mobile device, and any Cloud. One of the highlights of OpenEdge 11.0 is our patent-pending Multi-tenant Tables, in... Continue reading

As I have mentioned many times before in various forums, next generation business applications need to be able to quickly adapt to business changes. The old, traditional way of hard-coding workflows is just not acceptable anymore. There is a need to drive continuous change and process improvement even within pre-existing business applications. But how can you tell whether or not... Continue reading