Progress Software is going back to what it does best as it eyes leadership in the application platform-as-a-service (PaaS) market.
The key to achieving its goals is its ecosystem of more than 1,500 independent software vendors (ISVs) supporting more than 5,000 applications, 6 million users and generating over $5 billion in annual revenues.
"One of the targets for us are new ISVs looking for a cost-effective platform in the cloud to build and then deploy their applications and get to market quickly and cheaply," Andy Zupsic, senior vice president of Global Field Operations at Progress Software. "So, we work with cloud infrastructure service providers where they can port Progress OpenEdge as an application platform as a service for ISVs starting up. The cost for the new ISVs to start using Progress to develop their applications is really small. As they start to deploy, we make money with them as they grow their business."
"The cloud also creates a way of getting to market that takes a lot of the costs away," added Zupsic. "You can deploy your business applications on the cloud and suddenly, it is accessible to customers in China, US and around the world. It will radically shift the cost of going to market for start-up companies."
More than 4 million people use applications built on the OpenEdge platform and of those, more than 400,000 subscribers use 600 plus applications running in the cloud.
Under its plan, Progress divested 10 product lines to focus on three - OpenEdge; DataDirect Connect, which provides standards-based access to major relational databases and connectivity to virtually any data format; and Apama Analytics and Decisions, which consists of Complex Event Processing (CEP), Corticon Business Rules Management Solution (BRMS) and the Progress Control Tower dashboard, in the cloud.