Feb 23, 2026
FDM4, a long time Progress OpenEdge partner serving the apparel and promotional products industries, needed to modernize its application stack to support a major ERP go live for a large enterprise customer with roughly 500 users. FDM4 upgraded to a modern OpenEdge environment with Progress Application Server (PAS) for OpenEdge and Pro2 SQL replication, and worked closely with Progress’ Professional Services team. FDM4 improved performance, enabled more efficient, stateless architectures and successfully executed the go live without downtime. Find out how to modernize your OpenEdge application. Talk to us today. https://www.progress.com/openedge/services/contact
Transcript:
FDM4 hosts applications centered around progress database and software for the apparel industry, strictly around style, color, and size for ERP, warehouse, and e-commerce. For 31 years, OpenEdge has been a focal point of our application. We're using everything from TDE to Replication Plus. We contracted Progress to work with us around Pro2 SQL and AI and all that and keeping the databases in sync across multiple platforms. We were on 11.7 of Progress. We needed to modernize and get ready for more stateless applications, and PASOE was also a focal point of-- it's much more efficient, with multiple agents hitting it, hitting the database at the same time, way more efficient. There's no other way to say it.
Plus, it makes our architecture, our UI, our new platform is going to be in view on the front end, so it's going to make it work seamlessly together. Well, they came in since it was going to be our first big customer, go live of about 500 people on a big ERP system, a billion-dollar company, there was a lot of risk. We didn't know what we were going to be up against. And they were alongside with us. They were on call 24/7. We went live, and they were there to support us. We had a couple issues with memory and they rectified it, so they helped us figure out our issues.
Well, the programmers really liked it a lot better. They liked the UI. We're going towards Bitbucket and local dev. So that with Linux on Ubuntu, it all comes together. They wouldn't have worked on our old framework. So everybody internally and externally were happy with it.
The success was the customers stayed up live, and the systems were fast. I wasn't getting a call from the CEOs at nighttime. So that's really how I judge success, yes.
Memorable moments, like I kind of stated earlier, that we didn't go down. How's that for a memorable moment? And that's always a big deal when you have a large customer going live.
No, they were there to support us. They were there by email, phone call, and I didn't have to go through the normal hoops of dialing in when I needed them. So I gave them plenty of opportunity, "I need you," It was at the last minute, and they were there. So yeah, my team has worked very well for over 30 years with Progress.
