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Issue 1, 2016 |
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Innovate and compete in the digital world
Software AG is committed to ensuring that Adabas & Natural evolve and adapt to meet new industry standards, business practices and technology so your systems can continue to run on Adabas & Natural—forever. This article provides an overview of our product strategy for Adabas & Natural. To get the full details, download and read the Adabas & Natural Statement of Direction 2015-2020.
The irreplaceable value of custom applications
Adabas & Natural have run your business- and mission-critical applications for years, always providing reliably high levels of performance, availability and security. Today, your applications must and can play a significant role in taking advantage of new digital opportunities brought on by mobile, big data, cloud and the Internet of Things (IoT). Business processes must connect to a variety of applications, business partners and batch processes as well as integrate with other systems and end users—all with the goal of providing your users an omni-channel experience.
Omni-channel provides the customer (or user) with a seamless experience, no matter whether transactions are conducted online from a desktop or mobile device, by telephone or in person. What distinguishes the omni-channel experience from the multichannel experience is that there is true integration between channels on the back-end. Imagine the difference that can mean to your business as you strive to compete with nimble startups.
Adabas & Natural product strategy
To harness the opportunities of today’s rapidly digitizing economies and proliferation of the Internet of Things, Software AG has introduced the world’s first Digital Business Platform. The Digital Business Platform, is designed to deliver applications, processes, business models and enterprise “built to change” to respond to real-time business events or fast-changing market conditions. Adabas & Natural are first in class when it comes to leveraging the newest capabilities of the Digital Business Platform, enabling you to quickly build business applications for the digital age and provide your customers an omni-channel experience.
Figure 1: Learn more about the Digital Business Platform at www.digitalbusinessplatform.com
Our product strategy for Adabas & Natural is three-fold: 1) continue to build on the strengths that matter most to you; 2) ensure that your Adabas & Natural applications are future-ready when it comes to delivering on customer-centric digital business models; and 3) provide you robust training courses that will quickly bring new people up to speed on Adabas & Natural.
Agile development
Software development has changed over the past several years, moving away from traditional waterfall models toward more agile development methodologies that help enterprises deliver software faster and respond to constantly changing business requirements. The Eclipse-based development toolset—NaturalONE—enables you to develop, modernize and maintain application faster and with better quality.
We plan to extend NaturalONE to leverage more open-source tools through better integration with application life-cycle management tools, enhanced test automation capabilities and developer productivity tools. We are also focused on providing additional training and education resources to help you train new Natural application developers quickly.
SOA and API integration
We have long supported the integration of Adabas & Natural applications across platforms using SOA. Today, our products also leverage APIs to efficiently share information and data across applications as well as expose unique corporate services to customers and business partners.
Figure 2: Promote interoperability through an SOA and API ecosystem.
It is very easy for your developers to integrate Natural applications with the webMethods Integration Platform. Whether using a Natural wizard or NaturalONE, your developers can generate services for the webMethods Integration Platform. As our market-leading webMethods platform continues to evolve, we will continue to ensure the unique integration of Adabas & Natural products.
Data access and replication
To unlock the value of the data stored in your missions-critical applications and turn it into meaningful, actionable information to compete and differentiate in the digital world, sound data integration capabilities are required. We plan to extend the SQL access capabilities for Adabas to further simplify and speed up SQL query processing and integration. Existing SQL support for Natural provides access to a broad scope of RDBMS (e.g., DB2, Oracle, SQL Server) and will be further improved to stay up-to-date with the latest database versions.
Real-time replication of Adabas already supports RDBMS, data warehouse DBMS and messaging middleware. New enhancements will focus on supporting big data analytics with real-time replication to components of our Digital Business Platform.
Big data analytics
Big data technologies address analytical requirements that cannot be accomplished with traditional database systems. The key data integration technologies for Adabas, such as remote access, SQL processing, data replication and REST/Java API, are the foundation to connect Adabas into a variety of different big data platforms.
Figure 3: Increase the value of your data by leveraging big data analytics.
We plan to simplify the process of sharing Adabas business and infrastructure data with big data platforms that can analyze and correlate this data with other internal/external data sources (e.g., mobile, social media, the IoT). The deep-level integration with Software AG’s streaming analytics and in-memory data fabric allows customers to address new use cases without jeopardizing the reliability of the Adabas transaction platform or adding unpredictable load.
Web applications
Natural for AJAX allows customers today to develop Web/AJAX applications natively in Natural without learning additional Web technologies (e.g., JavaScript®, HTML). This enables your developer teams to quickly expose valuable business logic in a modern and secure way to end users. We plan to extend the Natural Web/AJAX capabilities to scale to different screen sizes (e.g., using responsive Web design), optimizing the end-user experience so users can accomplish their tasks quickly. This will allow Natural application developers to deliver Web applications with a better user experience to increase end-user productivity and satisfaction.
Mobile enablement
Our goal is to enable digital business models by better engaging with your employees, partners and customers through mobile devices without replacing your valuable core processes and transaction processing. We will support mobile-device Web browsers with responsive technology and enhance the capabilities to connect to Adabas & Natural in a service-oriented and event-driven way. This integration will enable Adabas & Natural applications to provide a seamless end-to-end experience between mobile apps and enterprise applications.
Conclusion
Our Adabas & Natural product strategy reinforces bimodal IT by ensuring you can “renovate the core to exploit the new.” We not only will continue to emphasize the performance, availability and security of your Adabas & Natural systems but also provide you the agility and speed you need to take advantage of the Digital Business Platform to become a successful Digital Enterprise.
More information
Learn why you can count on your Adabas & Natural systems being an integral part of your future for competing and differentiating in the digital world. Be sure to read the full Adabas & Natural Statement of Direction 2015-2020.