Progress Software announces new strategic focus

Progress Software, one of the IT firms credited with inventing the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), has announced it will divest multiple on-premise SOA product lines and focus on cloud-enabled IT as part of the company's commitment to continuous innovation and advancement.

According to CEO Jay Bhatt, Progress will focus on cloud-based development to meet the growing demand for the creation, migration and adoption of SaaS and cloud services. The company will divest products such as Actional, Artix, DataXtend, FuseSource, Savvion, Shadow and Sonic by 2013 as part of a new strategic plan to lead computing evolution from on-premise SOA to the cloud.

The strategy is in line with reports by a leading independent IT research and advisory company that found that by 2015, most enterprises will have part of their business software running in the cloud, and that cloud-based solutions will be growing at a faster rate than on-premise solutions.

Reports also show that very few organisations are effectively collecting and analysing big data in real-time. Progress will meet this gap in the market by focusing on a singular, unified product offering, which enables customers and partners to deploy, access and analyse applications on any platform, any device and any cloud with the industry's fastest time-to-value.

Rick Parry, Managing Director of AIGS, Progress' distributor for sub-Saharan Africa, is enthusiastic about the new strategy and fully supports the decision made by Progress, and has stated that AIGS aims to continue distributing the divested products to the local market in its own capacity.

“All of the products that Progress is divesting are 'best-in-class', and rated extremely highly by analysts and the market as a whole. Even though Progress is divesting themselves of, among other products, Sonic and Actional, as far as AIGS is concerned, it is 'business as usual',” Parry has stated.

As a result, the Progress Africa Conference to be held at Legend Golf and Safari Resort, in June, will still feature the divested products as scheduled.

Parry emphasises the change in focus will not negatively impact users. “I am assured by Progress that they will be paying extremely careful consideration to ensuring the same high standard of support and maintenance our customers currently enjoy will continue after acquisition.”

Under the new plan, Progress will unify the capabilities of OpenEdge, the Progress Arcade portal, DataDirect Connect, Apama Analytics and Decisions complex event processing capabilities, Corticon Business Rules Management Solution (BRMS) and the Progress Control Tower, in the cloud. As a result, Progress is poised to create the industry's most capable and language-agnostic aPaas offering, with multi-tenancy, big data connectivity, and real-time analytics in a new generation category.

“With this decision, we have decided to go 'all in' with the cloud,” Progress VP for SaaS Colleen Smith stated. Smith described the new approach as “a hybrid IT model that will be the next-generation aPaas”. Progress aims to provide simple and powerful application development tools to help ISVs migrate their applications easily and cost-effectively to the cloud, let start-up SaaS firms quickly design and deploy new cloud-based applications, and provide a reliable SaaS platform for deployment, operations and management.

Smith remains adamant that the company is not walking away from connectivity by selling its enterprise infrastructure. “I don't want anyone to believe anyone that says on-premise is dead or that it's going away,” Smith stated. “What we're seeing is a shift to more cloud-based investments, and we need to make sure we bridge between on-premise and the cloud for IT.”