Technology Architecture

QAD’s strategy is to choose technology that offers us the power to build and deliver the best possible solutions for our target markets and deliver that functionality at the lowest possible cost of ownership for our customers. Furthermore, we strongly believe that within the technology choices we make, we have to give our customers the freedom to choose deployment platforms that best fit their corporate strategies with respect to operating systems, choice of databases and interoperability and connectivity architectures.

The QAD Open Technology strategy allows organizations to be responsive in how they deploy, optimize, integrate and extend their core processes while safeguarding integrity, security and control.

• Flexibly adapt to new or changing business conditions and processes
• Evolve information systems easily and painlessly as business conditions and functional requirements change
• Accommodate future change while minimizing the cost of ownership

QAD delivers a technology architecture that allows the client interface and presentation of QAD application data to be molded and extended to suit end-user requirements without redesigning or reengineering the underlying business logic. The goal of allowing an implementation to be adjusted and tuned for the best possible user experience – be it to the organization, role or specific end user needs – is core to QAD’s usability strategy.

Central to the Open Technology strategy is the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) model. This model exposes business functionality to an appropriate degree of granularity to interoperate with any technology that can communicate with the many technical implementations that we support. These integration capabilities not only allow other systems to pass data into QAD Enterprise Applications or execute QAD functionality, but also alert, through extensive event publishing capabilities, on changing business conditions inside the QAD application suite. This makes for a seamless integration of QAD Enterprise Applications in a process that transcends other applications and organizational boundaries, such as the supply chain.

QAD Technology Partners

QAD has unique alliances with its technology partners. We carefully build relationships with our embedded technology partners so that they understand how to support us, from an architecture or technology point of view, in order to deliver on our value message to our customers. This close collaboration truly extends our research and development capabilities and lets all parties to stay focused on their core competencies.

We seek to strengthen our technology alliances and keep striving for the best tools available, to deliver the rich and broad functionality that our customers have come to expect. Alongside our partners, we seek to deliver the best possible usability in the industry with sustained productivity, while at the same time enabling the lowest cost of ownership on an ongoing basis.

As one of our key technology providers, Progress Software Corporation provides a sophisticated technology platform with a remarkably low cost of ownership. The Progress OpenEdge Application Server technology and Advanced Business Language provides the basis for flexible and productive software application development and an effective, proven and trouble-free runtime environment. Progress’ leading Sonic Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) provides the message architecture that empowers and extends QAD’s service oriented business applications to operate on a true “distributed” model.

As our client architecture, we have chosen Microsoft Windows. As evidenced in our tremendous advances in usability, putting tremendous power and productivity into the hands of end users, we will continue to rely on Windows to help drive continuous improvement in the end user experience. Easy integration with the end user’s desktop and Microsoft Office productivity tools as well as customization capabilities all work to help end users better organize their work environment. Comprehensive process maps, also customizable to the end user’s organization, guide users to understand and be more effective in their roles.

Our Reporting and Business Intelligence functionalities are driven by the Cognos ReportNet environment. Seamlessly integrated with the end user’s menu and application system, the environment can be tuned to display KPI monitors, dashboards, scorecards and other metrics to facilitate better decision making, enable proactive management and assist users in their day-to-day work.