Comment C.a. Discussion

[TomBascom]

Perhaps I'm an overly suspicious for but I cannot help but notice that the new direction du jour is Cognitive Applications and that the new CEO is from Computer Associates. I smell a gray paint job in the future.

 

[TheMadDBA]

I didn't know that... I was telling somebody else about the earnings call transcript and how all of the language concerning OE was very CA-like. Mature, serve customers profitably, etc.

 

[jdpjamesp]

Can someone explain what that means to a luddite?

 

[TomBascom]

Which "that" might you be referring to?

(I suspect that it might be time for a chit-chat thread...)

 

[TheMadDBA]

C.A. is one of those companies that buys older/niche technology... and bleeds it do death by cutting spending on development/support/marketing and riding the maintenance gravy train.. sometimes increasing maintenance costs for customers that are considered "trapped".

Nobody ever comes out and says that is their plan for a product, but the management-speak version of that is usually pretty close to what was said in the earnings call.

Mature market = Not expecting any growth and/or not enough growth to make the stockholders happy.

Serve customers profitably = Lets make the most money off our existing customer base/revenue stream without forcing too many of them to leave right away.

 

[jdpjamesp]

Thanks Keith. I sincerely hope this is not the case. It may be a rather rocky road to A.N.Other technology.

 

[TheMadDBA]

Who knows what will happen or what the real plans are. Based on the statements the new CEO made and the massive reduction in head count (more than just the one sitefinity division) makes me wonder about the future though.

Of course the new CEO could be out of the picture or have a massive change of heart. I must confess I am not entirely shocked by this turn of events though. They finally admitted that new vendors aren't adopting OE and they mostly rely on user increases from existing customers or the occasional big vendor sale to make meaningful (from a stockholder perspective) increases in OE revenue. I think a lot of us knew this already and now the cat is out of the bag.

The short sighted nature of the last few regimes certainly haven't helped the future of OE. Wasted no telling how much time and money on products that PSC no longer owns or aren't showing the profit and growth they wanted. They did just enough to open up the DB via SQL and very little to make the 4GL work with other databases. Nothing against the product teams.. they can only do what the budget allows, but you can't have an isolated database and language these days.

If they had only spent all that time and effort on OE (and some of that money in the bank they love to brag about).. who knows where it would be now.

 

[TomBascom]

CA doesn't kill products. They milk them. For as long as possible.

Maybe I'm right and the current moves presage a corporate transaction. Or maybe Progress is just moving a few steps closer to blatantly following that model.

There is a lot of money to be made supporting such ecosystems. When there is a finite pool of resources supporting a stable niche you do not necessarily need to find another technology. Far better to work in a niche that appreciates *you* than to be a faceless cog in a horde of interchangeable lowest cost providers.

 

[TheMadDBA]

CA doesn't directly kill products, but part of the milking process is cutting expenses. Which sometimes results in the product dying sooner than it should have and a subset of customers moving off a lot quicker than they would have. Their acquisition list is full of dead or nearly dead (I don't want to get on the cart...) products.

Unless I was much younger I wouldn't worry about future OE employment... it will be around for a long time. If they do start cutting corners it would actually be good news for consultants I think. Certainly make key employees more valuable to their companies.

But you have to agree that those comments from the CEO will be brought up by anybody who is directly competing with OE or an OE based product. Assuming they can google

 

[jdpjamesp]

It will certainly make things interesting from a PUG perspective. No idea what it's like over you side of the pond, but here in the UK we're struggling to retain membership as it is. I certainly wonder sometimes if I'll be the guy to put the thing to sleep one day.

 

[TomBascom]

You need to stop marketing like Progress

In such an environment PUGs should become more valuable than ever.

 

[RealHeavyDude]

Yesterday I attended a Progress customer day in Switzerland and they announced that licenses cost will increase 9% on average which will of course also have an impact on the maintenance fees ...

Me, just being a humble developer, maybe I did get it wrong - but to me it looks like the milking has begun ...

 

[joey.jeremiah]

It's essentially a change in direction from Digital Factory to the Cognitive thing and we'll probably see alot happening in that area this year. There's no real change to OpenEdge.

 

[jdpjamesp]

I hope you're right, but you do have to remember that's the inside line. Customer experience may well differ from that.

 

[TomBascom]

Price increases aren't new. I think it has been a couple of years so it was time.

 

[joey.jeremiah]

From what I've heard, alot of stuff is planned for OpenEdge. The machine learning and Cognitive thing are an interesting topic and it would be interesting to see what they have planned. We will probably hear more about it soon.

 

[TomBascom]

"Digital Factory" and its sidekick "Digital Transformation" was quite possibly the most ridiculously empty marketechture of the last 50 years. Completely devoid of content and utterly unexplainable to anyone.

At least with "Cognitive Applications" you can sort of imagine that there might be something more than a pending corporate acquisition going on.

 

[Newbie211]

Are "Cognitive Applications"something you would find helpful/additive at your current company / for clients and do you see it as a fit within the broader Progress software portfolio?

Some more information here on a company that purchased a few months ago in case you missed it:

The Future of Application Development Is Here and it Is Cognitive-First

 

[Rob Fitzpatrick]

"Digital Factory" and its sidekick "Digital Transformation" was quite possibly the most ridiculously empty marketechture of the last 50 years.

Amen. I was completely confused when people started talking about "digital" in the last couple of years as if it were a new thing. What have we been making up until now, analog software?