Progress Launches PaaS For Mobile, On-Premises Apps

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Charles Babcock.

Microsoft has platform-as-a-service. VMware has PaaS. Savvis has PaaS. Why shouldn’t Progress Software have PaaS too?  The other parties offer PaaS as part of their cloud service offerings. Progress, until now, hasn’t been viewed as either a cloud service or cloud software provider. That’s why it needs PaaS. Earlier this month, Progress announced its Progress Pacific PaaS system for cloud application and mobile developers. The system won’t become available until July.

Progress already has a presence in on-premises development. The company name springs from what was originally the Progress 4GL language, which it changed in 2006 to OpenEdge Advanced Business Language (ABL) to escape the limitations of being classified as a fourth-generation language. However, ABL maintains an English-like syntax and access to a built-in relational database, like its 4GL predecessor…

But Progress has constantly expanded the capabilities of OpenEdge until it’s become a combined language and workflow platform from which business processes may be designed and programmed.  Phil Pead, Progress CEO, said in an interview that Pacific is a rapid application development environment hosted on Amazon Web Services. The name Pacific, an unusual choice for a Boston-area company, reflects Progress’ acquisition of Rollbase in the San Francisco Bay area. Rollbase was a Saratoga, Calif., supplier of a browser-based PaaS, which emerged one year after Progress had launched OpenEdge ABL. It features an HTML and JavaScript environment for developers with a limited knowledge of programming languages like C and Java. Progress acquired Rollbase June 10…

Read more from the source @ http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/platform/progress-launches-paas-for-mobile-on-pre/240157338