Case Study:

Salient & ProGet ISV Edition

In just a matter of weeks, Salient replaced their proprietary, public-facing download center with ProGet ISV Edition.

Salient Management Company provides high-performance business intelligence software and consulting to the world’s leading consumer-packaged goods (CPG) companies. 

Industry:  IT Consulting

Location:  New York, US

Website: www.salient.com

The Challenge:

Salient Management Company is an independent software vendor (ISV) that provides business intelligence solutions. Their technology platform includes various components that can be deployed on different cloud platforms (such as AWS or Azure) or on-premises. The installation can be managed by the user or Salient’s technical team.

As an ISV, Salient focuses on technology advancement, which is reflected in the powerful, flexible, and interactive front-end tools they offer. To live up to these values, Salient also required a download center that is efficient, user-friendly, and provides easy access to software and updates.

However, the old download center did not meet these requirements. It crashed frequently and caused frustration for both Salient and its customers. In addition, the lack of usability made it difficult for customers to know which packages and dependencies to download and install. This posed a major problem for all parties involved.

After reviewing various options to improve the download center, Salient concluded that the best solution was to develop a new download center from scratch.

Solution:

Salient’s engineers are certainly capable of developing a new download center that would allow users to easily find and download the various versions of the components they need. However, this would be a time-consuming process and would require significant long-term maintenance. The previous download center was an in-house product, and they wanted to avoid having to maintain yet another product.

Unfortunately, there were no commercially available “ISV Download Center” products on the market. The closest options were FTP and file servers, but these options would not provide a good user experience and could lead to human errors, which would increase operational costs.

Joshua Blaine, a Salient engineer, and long-time ProGet user, along with Bobbejo Kohler (Systems Analyst), thought that ProGet might be a suitable solution for their download center. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but they could use Universal Packages and provide SAML-based logins for their users.

After buying ProGet Enterprise, Joshua and Bobbejo participated in a Customer Success engagement with our product engineers. This is a standard service we provide to new users, to ensure they are properly set up and getting the most out of our products.

When learning Salient’s use case, it became clear that ProGet was not the best fit as a download center. It was close but lacked a few key features. As a result, we decided to work together to create ProGet ISV Edition, a specialized offering to meet Salient’s and other ISV customers’ needs.

Over the coming weeks, we collaborated with Salient to learn the product gaps and developed some new features, including White Labeling and Tile View for Feeds. Within a matter of weeks, Salient was able to use these features and start rolling out their new download center.

Today, Salient utilizes ProGet ISV Edition to provide a user-friendly download center with the flexibility they need. This not only resolved the issues they were previously facing but made it significantly easier to provide new versions of their software to customers.

Results:

✓ User-friendly Download Center with virtually no maintenance costs
✓ Easy to publish new versions with release notes, dependencies, and more
✓ Users can quickly find versions and required dependencies  
✓ Single Sign-On experience using SAML

Slide to compare Before & After