On IT-business alignment and related things

Progress Software – getting past "Who"?

A couple of months back I had a brief Twitter exchange with David Bressler of Progress Software (@djbressler), following a comment I’d seen from Judith Hurwitz (@jhurwitz) at Progress’ analyst day regarding the lack of brand awareness that the company has out there in industry. What I said was: “Progress is a bit like Unilever – top-level brand is vanilla, sub-brands have chops”. What I meant is that these days, there’s little knowledge of what Progress does (a typical response is either “Who?” or possibly “oh, they used to sell a 4GL and a database in the 1990s, didn’t they”) – whereas there’s much more recognition of brands like Sonic (SOA infrastructure), Actional (SOA management / governance), IONA (middleware, SOA infrastructure), Apama (event processing), DataXtend (data integration) and DataDirect (data connectivity, legacy application integration).

David replied that Progress is a technology company’s company – which is absolutely correct: Progress has a long and successful history of providing a platform for other software vendors to embed in their application offerings. And he followed up with this blog entry, saying “We’d love for the Progress brand to have some chops, and we’re trying but it’s not trivial.”

Well, for a few weeks I’d been meaning to write a blog post of my own exploring this – but in the general headlong rush that we’ve been experiencing so far this year, I’d forgotten to write that post. When I saw today’s news that there’s been a change at the top at Progress, though, I was finally prompted to write some thoughts down. (Thanks for the pointer Miko).

The main thought in my head all those weeks ago was that it’s all very well for Progress to be a bit like Unilever – with the sub-brands (Sonic, Actional, Apama, DataDirect, and so on) having much more visibility in industry than the parent brand – as long as the company doesn’t want to start pulling together broader IT and business infrastructure propositions that tie together pieces from the different brands. Unilever is well-known for owning a vast portfolio of products, many of which actually compete with others in the portfolio (Dove v Lux; or Persil v Surf, for example. The invisibility of the parent brand is fine for Unilever, but it’s bad news for Progress if it wants to really make the most of its potential within enterprises (by cross-selling or bundling its products to help customers with broader opportunities, for example).

So this is the point where the company has to undergo a pretty radical shift. As reported in PCWorld, the new Progress Software CEO (formerly the COO) has established a target of doubling the company’s annual revenue to around $1bn, by “reorienting sales towards multi-product suites, as well as aiming marketing messages more at business executives than IT workers” – that is, precisely what it’s not currently suited to doing.

This goal makes absolute sense, and in fact it has made sense for ages. The majority of the markets where Progress’ brands play are growth markets where there’s real opportunity, right now; and what’s more, the combination of the offerings could have real power, too.

The required shift will be no picnic, but there are worse times for Progress to be trying to make it happen. There’s a new man at the top with a new broom, no doubt; and what’s more, there’s still a small window of opportunity open for another medium-to-large-sized specialist infrastructure software vendor to pick up business, following BEA’s acquisition by Oracle a few months back. TIBCO and Software AG have recently been making much of BEA’s disappearance as an “independent” infrastructure software vendor, and it’s surely no coincidence that both these companies also have aspirations to reach $1bn in annual revenues (Software AG has been particularly vocal about this of late). Progress has long had the potential to join Software AG and TIBCO as a serious contender for enterprises wanting to avoid getting into bed with the MISO pack (Microsoft, IBM, SAP or Oracle) for whatever reason, but until now it just never seemed to be able to be bothered to do what was necessary.

With a new CEO at the top, it’ll be fascinating to see whether Progress can move up a gear. If it succeeds, then enterprises wanting to avoid giving too much technology supplier power to the MISO pack may well have a new choice – and in a market where consolidation has recently been rampant, more choice would be refreshing for everyone.

Tags: industry, integration, Progress, SOA, Software AG, TIBCO

Posted by admin on April 1, 2009