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TIBCO and Progress – Responsiveness drives results?

Monday, September 27, 2010 by

Last week, infrastructure generalist vendors TIBCO and Progress Software, both of which sell BPM technology alongside complementary technology (event processing, ESB, data integration, analytics, and so on) announced their Q3 financial results.

TIBCO announced that it had achieved 23% growth year-on-year in both license revenue and overall; Progress announced that it had achieved 8% growth overall (but 14% from software licenses). For the year-to-date, TIBCO hit revenue of $512.8m; Progress hit revenue of $384m.

Interestingly, both companies share a figure: both companies source around 35% of their revenue from new license sales, with 65% coming from services and maintenance – both companies are mature. Also interestingly, both companies have been using similar campaigns to attempt to reinvigorate their fortunes, and engage customers in business conversations rather than deep-tech conversations (“my ESB’s faster than your ESB,” etc).

For TIBCO, it’s all about helping customers capitalise on a “two-second advantage“; for Progress it’s all about building companies that exhibit Operational Responsiveness. For both, it’s about tying together technology that helps organisations sense changes, opportunities and challenges quickly (event processing) with technology that can make sense of those events and drive the right response into the organisation or the market (BPM, integration technologies, and so on).

Both companies have played up the roles that their “responsiveness” technologies are playing in their growth. It’s certainly good to see veteran players like TIBCO and Progress rediscovering a bit of mojo; let’s see whether they can parlay this upward swing into longer-term growth plays. For me, the health of a handful of  “independent” infrastructure software players is a good sign for industry at large, because it maintains a level of industry choice that just wouldn’t be there if the market collapsed down to the usual behemoths.

Posted in BPM

2 Responses to TIBCO and Progress – Responsiveness drives results?

  1. Pingback: BPM Quotes of the week « Adam Deane

  2. Pingback: On IT-business alignment and related things » TIBCO’s 2010: maintaining momentum, branching out

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