What to Think About When Modernizing Your OpenEdge App

In the world of technology, 30 years is a lifetime. In fact, you could more accurately describe it as multiple lifetimes. That’s why it is so important to always have your eye on the horizon—we all need to be ready to shift to keep up with the needs and requirements of our customers. 

To maintain a competitive edge in today’s marketplaces, you need to investment in your technology and make sure that the vendor supporting it is flexible and capable of addressing shifting needs and requirements. Otherwise, something that is a solution today can limit your ability to capitalize on growth and new opportunities to expand and maintain your customer base.

Modernizing OpenEdge Applications with Contemporary Technology and Techniques

Progress OpenEdge has been used by companies for over 30 years. In fact, we estimate that nearly 6 million people around the world use a business application that’s powered by OpenEdge in one way or another.

The reason many of these applications are still actively being used today is precisely because we’ve embraced new development technologies and techniques with open arms. The OpenEdge 12 series in particular is a great showcase of that, offering major database performance and scalability enhancements that enable companies to keep pace with evolving customer needs.

IDC recently released a report that analyzed how the OpenEdge platform has evolved to provide our customers with everything they need to modernize their applications. That ensures they are getting the most out of their OpenEdge investment and providing their businesses with applications that continually bring value to the rest of the organization.

As Arnal Dayaratna, Research Director of Software Development at IDC, shared:

“The bevy of enhancements specific to OpenEdge 12.2 further consolidates Progress' positioning as the premier resource for application modernization initiatives for OpenEdge. Progress' deep knowledge of the operational, developer productivity, performance and security enhancements in OpenEdge 12.2 render it uniquely qualified to continue to lead application modernization initiatives.”

The IDC report covers top challenges that many OpenEdge customers face as they modernize their apps and how we support our customers in overcoming these obstacles. It touches on critical app development focal points, like:

• Application infrastructure (including cloud-based deployments)
• DevOps toolchains and processes
• Enterprise-grade security

Additionally, the report looks at some of our customer modernization success stories and some of our future plans. Here’s a hint: we’re always looking to for new ways to give our customers the ability to leverage modern application development practices and tools. That includes cloud deployment, Agile development, DevOps, modern integrated development environments (IDEs) and observability and monitoring technologies.

If you want to gain more insight into how you can modernize your application, download the full report.

Read IDC Whitepaper

Modernization in Action: The State Electric Supply Co. Success Story

If you’re more a hands-on person, we recently hosted a webinar with State Electric and their digital agency, Americaneagle.com, about their modernization process.

State Electric is a leading electrical products distributor that goes by the motto “customer focused, quality driven.” To live up to that promise, State Electric wanted to evolve how it engaged customers by transforming its ecommerce site.

Working with our partner Americaneagle.com, State Electric combined Infor SX.e, an OpenEdge-based ERP, and Sitefinity, our CMS platform, to deliver a frictionless B2B ecommerce experience. This robust experience capitalized on ERP capabilities like warehouse logistics, catalog product management and pricing and delivered the kind of boundary-pushing frontend that you can only get with Sitefinity.

The end result is a modern ecommerce experience that streamlines warehouse activities and drives customer engagement, leading to:

• 25% increase in new user registrations
• 120% improvement in conversion rates
• 244% lift in revenue generated from site search

Additionally, the new ecommerce experience even won some industry acclaim for bringing the B2C online shopping feel to the B2B world. In the words of State Electric: “OpenEdge ties it all together.”

To learn more, we encourage you to come check out what’s new in OpenEdge. And if you are wondering if migrating to the OpenEdge 12 series makes sense for your business, our expert panel recently discussed the implementation experiences of customers just like you! 

Watch Expert Panel