Progress Software has reported record revenue for the first quarter ended 29 February 2004 of $86.4 million, up 20% from $71.8 million in the first quarter of 2003.
On the local front, Progress Software South Africa was the best performing Progress subsidiary in the EMEA region, with the company achieving overall growth of 76% compared to the first quarter of 2003.
"Progress continues to outperform other major software companies by a significant margin," says Rick Parry, MD of Progress Software South Africa. "Locally, we budgeted to achieve 12% of our annual revenue in Q1, in keeping with South African business trends. However, we managed to achieve 20% of budget, nearly doubling our year-on-year new business revenue for the period."
Parry attributes the company`s growth to a healthy sales pipeline, and to the annuity-based revenue the company is generating through its software as a service model.
"Our software as a service revenue now accounts for around 35% of our total licence revenue, which puts us in a very strong position."
Parry says the company`s performance is testimony to the maturity of the Progress community in Africa, and to the growing acceptance in the market of Progress`s offerings. Local wins include the adoption of Progress technology by the Free State provincial legislature, with several other provinces soon to follow suit.
Globally, Progress not only saw a significant revenue contribution from its new DataDirect Technologies operation, but the Progress Company, Sonic Software and ObjectStore all demonstrated solid revenue increases.
Software licence revenue increased 33% to $33.9 million from $25.5 million in the same quarter last year.
On a pro forma basis, operating income increased 77% to $10.5 million from $5.9 million in the same quarter last year. Pro forma net income increased 59% to $7.5 million from $4.7 million in the same quarter last year and diluted earnings per share increased 46% to 19c per share from 13c in the first quarter of fiscal 2003.
The company`s cash and short-term investments at the end of the quarter totalled $149 million. During the first quarter, the company bought 46 000 shares of its stock at a cost of $1 million. The company`s existing repurchase authorisation, under which 9.9 million shares remain available for repurchase, expires on 30 September.
"The company has demonstrated its ability to rapidly integrate new operations and leverage its growth to deliver greater operating margins and sharply increased pro forma operating income, net income and EPS," Parry notes. "We not only saw a significant revenue contribution from our new DataDirect Technologies operation, but the Progress Company, Sonic Software and ObjectStore all demonstrated solid revenue increases."
Recent highlights
* The Progress Company released Progress OpenEdge 10, the foundation for its component-based approach to building distributed applications for service-oriented architectures (SOA).
* Prebon Yamane, a premier broker for worldwide financial institutions, selected SonicMQ as its global messaging infrastructure.
* PeerDirect Corporation released PeerDirect Remote Office, a product suite that provides independent software vendors and corporate IT departments with the ability to build applications and deploy data directly to remote offices while synchronised and managed from a single data centre.
* ObjectStore announced the first EPC-compliant database technology for radio frequency identification (RFID).
* DataDirect Technologies` SupportLink Technical Support Programme won the NorthFace Award for customer service for the third year in a row.
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