By Cat Yong
Software AG has announced a fully cloud-based Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solution suite to support integration, process management and application development. These solutions help businesses harness the 4 megatrends of cloud, social, mobile and big data, in the areas of integration and business process management, while fully supporting integration of existing solutions in hybrid cloud environments.
“These solutions are interesting for certain types of customers,” pointed out Steve Keys, Senior Vice President for Software AG in APJ. “They could be customers who do not own IT infrastructures and don’t want to, but have need for process modeling, business process management and agile apps at the front end to drive those processes.”
He further described that these organisations are comfortable with Software-as-a-service (SaaS), and have core business processes that might run across different SaaS applications.
With the fully-cloud enabled Software AG Live suite comprising AgileApps Live, Process Live, and Integration Live, SMBs now can take on enterprise capabilities at much lower costs.
Keys said, “There is a large prevalent SMB market in APJ. I think cloud-enabled solutions are their interests.”
Agile apps and the SMB market
Keys also observed a compelling trend in the market, whereby subject matter experts who may not necessarily be IT-savvy, are building out apps for particular scenarios ie. sales department responding to a new proposal.
He explained, “They might use Process Live to begin to explain how the team could collaborate, and then build an app to bring participants into development of that proposal.”
Dubbed as citizen development by Gartner, these subject matter experts and business users develop easy apps by themselves without having to engage IT.
“Why use a sledgehammer to crack open a nut?” Keys used that analogy to demonstrate there are some tasks that do not require corporate IT stepping in, and that business users can self-serve.
According to Gartner, this type of agile apps by ‘citizen developers’ would be 25% of all business software by 2014.
Existing customers
A lot of Software AG’s work does target huge Fortune 500 companies. Keys said, “We also expect to see (these) existing customers to invest in Software AG Live as extension to the existing on-premise solution,” said Keys while adding the cloud-based solution suite would also appeal to agencies and departments within these large enterprises.
Keys opined that Software AG Live is the first true Paas with application development, integration and business process management. “Because there are products out there today that vendors might take mirror image of their apps and certify it for cloud usage. But, Software AG Live was written in the cloud for consumption in the cloud.”
He emphasised Software AG’s cloud based solution is interoperable with its on-premise solution and serves as an extension of their core platform. With dynamic cloud scaling, users can also burst into cloud and acquire on-demand additional capacity during peak traffic times.
“We are available to a broad range of markets that we already serve, but our strongest would have to be government, banking and FSI, utilities, manufacturing, retail and so on.”
Keys identified 4 major growth drivers for Software AG as being geographical expansion, acquisitions, organic growth and also partner-driven growth. “Our partner ecosystem will be very important,” he concluded.
