I suspect CA Plex will be around for many years to come but will never reach the potential the 1990’s CASE tools promised. I think Plex delievered on the promise but no one was listening including the plex developers who struggled with inheritance, polymorphism, separation of concerns, single responsibility.
Outsystems was created not too long after Plex has just been given 350million dollar funding by KKR & GS ! They nearly went bust twice before this new lowcode wave took off. They are the newest Unicorn on the block but I remember at a plex conference in Chicago and a Portuguese company had brought and demoed Outsystems to anyone who was interested. Hardly anyone showed any interest and there lies the problem neither CA nor users are technologists. When I look at the alumni of our community, not many after leaving plex have done startups or ‘****’ stuff either, it was if the 1990’s was their time and plex was bleeding edge then. CA Plex is like a time capsule of that time.
Obsysdian (Synon) if it remained private might have gone bust and where would we have been, then again it could have been up against Appian, Mendix and Outsystems pushing for traditional IT acceptance today. Staying private was key and for what ever reason the stakeholders sold out on their vision, Outsystems did not and nearly paid for their stubborn vision (going bust) that there must be a quicker way to model business into code.
Working for a vendor as I do today I can tell you most likey the amount of technical debit within the ide and generators would probably make it uneconomical to add anything major, its simpler and cheaper to start afresh.
Using other tools I miss how rock solid the plex ide is, it had years of stabilisation granted, but still impressive and testament to CA.
i don’t see where plex fits into today’s landscape, client server is long gone, there is no big data support, no nosql support, no swagger support, poor integration support, no web/mobile out of the box support, modern field types etc etc
so I think CA duty is to its existing customer to keep it rock solid and do not risk introducing change to business as usual by embarking on ambitious road maps.
What at a great tool CA Plex was and I miss it daily but really it is time to move on as you will dwindle your careers away fighting a cause only we even know exist.