The global enterprise software industry has been sluggish since Y2K, forcing the monolithic players in this arena to recognize the opportunities on offer from a segment somewhat lower down the business food chain. All of these vendors are currently implementing strategies for capitalizing on these opportunities by focusing on the constantly growing small-to-medium business sector.
The Progress Company has been squarely targeted on the SMB market for twenty years and is therefore perfectly positioned to exploit these opportunities should it be able to fend off the efforts of larger enterprise software organizations like Microsoft, Oracle and even SAP. This company is confident that these years of experience, and the niche-targeted solutions on offer by its application development partners, will pay dividends in the mid-market struggle ahead.
Rick Parry, Managing Director of Progress Software South Africa, begins: "We have a very mature base of application partners in SA. Companies which specialise in niche markets, developing and deploying applications that are designed to meet the needs of these markets specifically."
Parry continues: "We have fifteen such partners locally at the moment, and these organizations have developed solutions for a broad cross section of the overall market, in both the public and private sectors. There are three who develop applications purely for local government implementation, an automotive dealer market specialist, a hospital management application provider, numerous aspects of the financial industry and even property management application partners."
While the definition of an SMB may differ from market to market, Progress has found that several characteristics of such players are common across the globe. They demand vendors who truly understand their business and provide solutions which fit with short ROI periods. They generally have limited IT budgets and resources, and therefore rely on innovative software that will provide them with a competitive advantage. And finally, only true solutions providers can succeed in this space.
"Because this sector has been our core focus for so many years, what we have today is a host of marvellous niche applications from our long-time partner base. At the moment we`re also trying to get these partners working together to offer a complete end-to-end solution for our customers," Parry states.
Progress do not try to be all things to all customers, as it has seen that an application generic enough to take this approach will invariably fail in key business areas. These failures then lead to time-consuming and costly customization while also making for a difficult upgrade path and higher support requirements. None of these attributes would win such an application any business in this market segment.
Parry explains: "Taking an application designed for general use and then making it fit within a specific industry always requires that this application be bent, broken and rebuilt for it to function. By using an application developed from the ground up with the specific market in mind you forego all of these headaches."
Progress South Africa have a goldmine of applications designed for niche markets already available, all designed in the South African marketplace for South African conditions and by South Africans. "After all local is lekker, and we shouldn`t just be paying lip service to this slogan. And yet there is still far too much of a view amongst the buying public that for a software application to be any good, it has to be developed by an international organisation and deployed across the world. This is sheer nonsense."
Parry continues: "The reality of the situation is we do have peculiarities in our market. For instance in the case of applications which make extensive use of a WAN, the cost of bandwidth in SA would mean it wouldn`t work properly. If the application was designed without thinking about this infrastructure component and then you tried to run it over the bandwidth we can afford here it simply will not work. But an application designed within the constraints of the local environment will have no such stumbling blocks."
Progress are also an organisation dedicated to delivering solutions with the lowest possible Visual Cost of Ownership (VCO), an aim which is achieved through the sheer stability of the platform. One local instance of an implementation with 130 GB of disk space containing 125 different databases and 4500 online users requiring 24 by 7 access has been completed without the customer even needing a single DBA.
Parry concludes: "The message is clear. Our core focus is the mid-market and specific niches within that market. Our partners form a truly collaborative development community with an in-depth understanding of the businesses they go into, and we always deliver the lowest VCO possible. The SMB market is where we originate from, and it`s also where we are staying regardless of what our competition do."
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