3. Exchange 2005 Progress Users' Conference

Progress held it's annual Exchange Conference for its community of developers June 5-8 at Walt Disney World's Dolphin Hotel in Orlando. Exchange 2005 offered over 100 educational sessions, partner exhibits, product demonstrations and opportunities for discussion and networking for its international audience of nearly 1,000, including Progress Application Partners (APs), developers and end users.

About 70 C-level executives from Progress APs attended the special Business Forum, which featured a service-oriented architecture (SOA) panel discussion and the opportunity to meet with more than 15 industry influencers which included press and industry analysts, as well as some financial analysts. Analysts from AMR, Forrester, Gartner, and Hurwitz Associates met with Progress APs, as did eWeek Sr. Editor, Stan Gibson, and MBT (Manufacturing Business and Technology) Sr. Editor, Sidney Hill.

Several CIOs from large enterprises also attended the CIO Forum. The Architect's Forum attracted more than 80 CTOs, project managers and other high level technologists.

"The conference was a great success. Attendees were happy and enthusiastic about our current products and their future directions, and told me so," said Gus Bjorklund, wizard and vice president of technology for PSC. "A number of people said they've seen a change in Progress over the past couple of years. We don't just supply them with technology; we also help them to be successful through all the programs and services we provide."

An Eclipse demo inspired ovation among its community of developers.  In the coming months, Progress Software will extend access to the Eclipse open source integrated development environment (IDE) across all of its operating divisions: the Progress OpenEdge Division, DataDirect Technologies, Sonic Software and the Progress Real Time Division. This new IDE will simplify designing, developing and testing new applications, put development tools within easy reach, and automate many common tasks. The release of OpenEdge 10.1 this fall will also add auditing capability with a guaranteed non-repudiable audit trail for easy reporting with seamless access through the OpenEdge 4GL and standard SQL. Object-oriented language extensions to promote reuse, maintainability and robustness will also be provided.

Progress Software is a member of the Eclipse Foundation, a community committed to the implementation of a universal development platform. The Progress Real Time Division already offers an Eclipse plug-in for its EdgeXtend(R) distributed data access and caching software infrastructure.

One of the attending analysts was Judith Hurwitz who commented, "It is clear that Progress has consistently provided new tools and technologies to help its partners create software solutions that solve their clients' problems.  Progress has a track record of delivering on flexibility and ease of implementation for users."