By Cat Yong
From having one business unit for their OpenEdge databases, they have recently added two more for application development and deployment, and data integration.
Needless to say, the company has had to rationalise their product portfolios by decommissioning or selling products like Savvion, Sonic, and Apama. Since 2013, they also acquired companies like Rollbase, Modulus and most recently, Telerik.
“There is still lots more to do in terms of integration. But our products combined, makes it easier to build anything,” McNulty said.
In fact, Progress APJ’s 3-day Spark Conference, saw a huge number of customers and partners from Asia, Australia and New Zealand travelling to Perth to find out how to take their existing solution offerings, and use them with Progress’ new acquisitions.
For example, customers of Sitefinity, a rich content management system (CMS) from Telerik, want to learn Corticon, a rules-based engine solution.
Growing again
Since the company’s divestiture of some products and its shift to emphasise a reseller channel approach, Progress in APJ last year grew almost 80-percent, a feat they expect to repeat for the current financial year too.
“Our growth can be attributed to OpenEdge in terms of overall volume, and the size of (customer base), that wanted to upgrade,” said McNulty who also added that their platform-as-a-service (PaaS) Rollbase solution is gaining traction with service providers, and that they are in advanced negotiations with two in Malaysia.
OpenEdge databases have traditionally been a core contributor to Progress revenue, but the expectation right now is for app development and deployment, especially with their recent Telerik acquisition, to start pulling its own weight, too.
Less than 6 months ago, Progress had completed acquisition of Telerik and its application development lifecycle platform.
McNulty observed, “The biggest thing happening for us is Telerik and Rollbase and Modulus. In fact, we are encouraging our partners to learn Telerik front end solutions.”
The most significant area of growth in the industry is mobility, and this likely holds true for Progress as well. The company would be replacing their mobile solutions; OpenEdge mobile and Rollbase mobile, with Telerik’s platform.
Telerik so far
Activities have ramped up since acquisition of Telerik which McNulty observed had reduced the average age of Progress employees by about 15 years. Even so, the company has a big following in Asia Pacific, and in 2013 had focused on taking their solutions to market via existing Microsoft reseller channels.
McNulty said, “Its development tools complement Microsoft .NET, allowing independent software vendors (ISVs) to build .NET apps in a tenth of the time. Telerik’s Sitefinity content management system (CMS) is also very complementary to Microsoft SharePoint.
“Now, we are in touch with major Microsoft distributors in major APAC countries, and we have products for them.”
To date, Telerik solutions have about 60 system integrator partners, and McNulty shared that Progress in APJ would be able to grow and scale Telerik products without much need for increase in headcount.
With so much growth happening in the area of cloud, there is urgent need for solutions and their availability, to scale. McNulty said, “(At that time) we felt the best way to do that is to sign up with major distributors. It made no sense to have an enterprise sales team anymore (in Japan).
“This business model is doing well with products like Corticon and DataDirect, and we are replicating it to the rest of Asia Pacific, in countries where Progress has no direct presence,” he concluded.
(This journalist was at APJ Progress Spark Conference, Perth, as a guest of Progress APJ)
