Title: Arial 28pt.

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PWB509 Managing the evolution of your
PowerBuilder applications with Visual Expert
Saffron Stripling Export Account Manager
USA saffron.stripling_at_novalys.net August 15-19,
2004
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Introduction

• Sybase is introducing a new product on the PB
  market. This product is dedicated to extending
  the life of PB applications.
• Why did Sybase choose this product?
• Part I - Understanding the PowerBuilder market
• What kind of services does it provide?
• Part II Illustrating VE features

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I. UNDERSTANDING THE PB MARKET
A Worldwide survey

• In order to understand todays PB market and its
  future evolution, a worldwide survey on
  PowerBuilder was conducted in 2003
• 3100 developers from 107 countries answered this
  survey.

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I. UNDERSTANDING THE PB MARKET
Purpose of the survey

• The past few years have seen the emergence of
  Internet/Intranet architecture in IT systems. It
  is important to evaluate the current PB market,
  and how do users plan to use PB in the future?
• Sybase has been increasing the technical and
  marketing effort on PB for the past few years.
  What is the impact of these efforts on PB users?

Structure

• Different questions were asked to more than
  3000 developers from all over the world to
  evaluate the importance of PB in their
  environment.

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I. UNDERSTANDING THE PB MARKET

• the worldwide 2003
• PowerBuilder survey results

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I. UNDERSTANDING THE PB MARKET
A - Where are the respondent from? 
38
26
American developers are widely represented in
this survey. 26 of respondents are form Western
Europe.
The 2003 PowerBuilder Survey Results
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B- What is the size of PB teams?
I. UNDERSTANDING THE PB MARKET

PowerBuilder was used by projects of important
size (departmental projects or company projects).
This trend is confirmed. The average size of
development teams is12 people. More than half of
the teams count between 4 and 20 developers
The 2003 PowerBuilder Survey Results
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I. UNDERSTANDING THE PB MARKET
C- How long will PB be used for?
 
83

• PB will be used for a long time 83 believe they
  will use it for more than 2 years !
• The US forecast is very close to the one in other
  countries such as in Europe or Asia.

The 2003 PowerBuilder Survey Results
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I. UNDERSTANDING THE PB MARKET
D- Is PB used on existing applications, new
applications or both?
New applications 6
Both new and existing application 60
Existing application 34

• All developers stated they work on existing
  applications, which is not a surprise if we
  consider that PowerBuilder has become a mature
  tool.
• The proportion of users who intend to develop new
  applications with PowerBuilder remains important
  almost 60 !

The 2003 PowerBuilder Survey Results
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I. UNDERSTANDING THE PB MARKET
E- Which mark was PB given? 
PowerBuilder is an excellent tool whose users are
satisfied with. The average mark is close to
8/10 more than 80 of the users gave PB a mark
higher than 7/10.
The 2003 PowerBuilder Survey Results
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I. UNDERSTANDING THE PB MARKET
What can we conclude from this survey?

• This search shows the impact of PB will remain
  strategic in IT departments in the following
  years, teams are still sizeable.
• The bigger the application, the more it lasts,
  the more it takes to make it evolve.
• Many strategic applications are still daily
  developed with PowerBuilder.
• There is a need for these applications to be
  maintained and enhanced.

Therefore, Sybase chose to introduce a solution
named Visual Expert to help in maintaining and
developing existing PB applications
The 2003 PowerBuilder Survey Results
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II. MAKING LIFE EASIER

• VISUAL EXPERT

II.I Which situations are we targeting?
II.II Who and How
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II. MAKING LIFE EASIER
II.I Which situations are we targeting?

• The maintenance and development of existing PB
  applications often leads to a variety of
  hindrances, which take time and efforts to solve.

Situations involving Application Knowledge
Management
1. Joining a project
When someone joins a project they need several
months to master the application.
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II. MAKING LIFE EASIER
II.I Which situations are we targeting?
Situations involving the modification of an
application

• Every modification has the possibility of
  creating unexpected side effects
• These problems may appear very late in the cycle
  (even after deployment) and are costly to
  resolve.

• To avoid side effect issues, each modification
  should first be validated with an Impact Analysis.

• When an Impact Analysis is done manually it is
  time consuming and can be incomplete.

• Often there is not even the time available to
  conduct this analysis.

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II. MAKING LIFE EASIER
Share the knowledge of your Applications with
Visual Expert

• Visual Expert automates Impact Analysis
• The process becomes easy and fast.
• The results are immediate, complete and reliable.

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II. MAKING LIFE EASIER
II.II Who and How

• Who does it concern?
• Sooner or later, everybody in the
  development team is concerned.
• How are we going to go about it?
• Taking different examples of daily situations
  every development team meets and showing the
  appropriate solution for such situations.

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II. MAKING LIFE EASIER

• Daily examples with Visual Expert

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III. SYBASE AND VISUAL EXPERT

• With Visual Expert, Sybase provides PowerBuilder
  Developers a solution to deal more easily with
  heavy applications they have to maintain and
  enhance regularly.
• Do not hesitate to request a free version
  www.visual-expert.com
• contact_at_visual-expert.com