Developer skills are changing as software development is increasingly modular, with APIs as the linkage. Matt Robinson (below), Vice President, Technology at Progress says further changes are being driven by this and the moves to Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). He is also excited by the containerisation of enterprise apps, which means virtualisation without operating system bundling. He is based in Silicon Valley and is the former CEO and co-founder of Rollbase, before it was acquired by Progress in 2013.
The importance of APIs comes from separating the User Interface back-end from the data and business logic back-ends. “It is coming to the front of development. And it is leading to much better user experience,” he says.
Enterprise development has been lagging a bit, he admits – the consumer is having the better experience, particularly on mobile apps. “Enterprise apps just don't have that as a focus. However we are seeing the rise of Javascript and node.js as a platform. This allows us to build full stack java applications, and users can now also build their own interface to run on any device.”
Modules can be added as needed, with each application including other modules: for example, for security, and the ecosystem is rich and fast growing. “This repository is growing by 5000 modules a month. Who is qualifying these is yet to be solved – though enterprises can have their own modules and run only those. Progress now has Modulus (acquired recently) and this means we can take node applications and offer a full provisioning and deployment system. We are solving the deployment and scaling part of this, so you could upload your code, specify a number of compute units, and simply scale.”
This is one of the many reasons the company is attracted to node.js – javascript growth is off the chart, he says. “When you are building apps with technology like this it consists of a number of modules for specific tasks, and they expose themselves as APIs. So you have all the modules which communicate. Ultimately I think this is getting down to the quality of the developer. It will mean that being a good developer is not just coding, but getting the right pieces of technology and that is a different skill. It also goes back to the question about who is vetting these things.”
Once uploaded to the Modulus cloud it can be deployed across a number of specified providers such as just Amazon Europe or Amazon West, so it gives failover and scaling on a global basis. It is an environment with built-in analytics, giving logging and dashboards.
Progress obviously sees this as significant, particularly for the ISVs which make up its main target customer base. “There are three markets for the company; one is ISVs – traditionally the focus, and we are always looking to helps ISVs build their apps, and deploy them. We are also talking to big service providers about taking our platform. When we build something we ensure it can be deployed on any infrastructure, including hosted, cloud and on-premise, so service providers are very interested. It means we can compete with Salesforce.com and the Force platform; in a way they are creating the market for us since they don't license the platform. This is a growth market where the Service Providers and telcos have all the infrastructure and are looking for ways to monetise it.”
The third group for Progress is direct to bigger enterprises looking for a platform to speed internal apps. What appeals in all these markets is the level of control it offers. “We offer platform licenses so the infrastructure can be up to the customer. We hear all the time that users want to control everything – operating systems, infrastructures, etc.”
And while there isn't a particular industry or vertical sector showing all the growth, some are moving faster than others. “The most popular types of apps are industry -specific. In CRM apps, and then HR, we are seeing a lot of interest. There is a definite trend to specific apps, and we have customers building them, for example, in farming or construction. So another thing we can do is to price systems in new ways. One ISV is working on a farming app with a pricing model based on tonnage shipped.”
“This year our business will be continue to be driven by ISVs; they are the bulk of our business today and they will remain important this year. Our goal is to help them use the new technologies without having to sacrifice their investments. ISVs, often a new venture by an existing software company with a new SaaS product, are coming to us to build for tablet, mobile etc all in one.”