Progress Software Corporation History

Since 1981 Progress Software Corporation has delivered superior software products and services that empower its partners and customers to dramatically improve their development, deployment, integration and management of quality applications worldwide.

Progress Software was founded as Data Language in 1981 by Joseph Alsop, Clyde Kessel, and Charles Ziering. Focusing on application development and deployment software, Data Language introduced its Progress database management and applications development system in the mid-1980s.

Data Language changed its moniker to Progress Software in 1987 and by the early 1990s had enhanced its products with interfaces to databases such as Oracle. The company went public in 1991 and released a Windows version of its software two years later.

By the mid-1990s Progress had established a global profile and acquired Apptivity, which let Progress offer tools for developing Java-based applications.

In 1999 Progress created a unit to offer products and services to independent software vendors looking to enter the application services provider market. In 2001 the company split its business into three operating units, establishing development software business Progress Company (a division of Progress Software), and forming wholly owned subsidiaries Sonic Software Corporation (messaging software) and NuSphere Corporation (open source software and services). Progress added new unit PeerDirect Corporation for distributed computing applications in 2002. That year the company acquired database software company eXcelon for $24 million in a move to expand its offerings to include XML services and database products.

The following year Progress acquired DataDirect Technologies, a supplier of data connectivity tools, for about $88 million in cash. Acquisitions of Persistence Software for $16 million in 2004 and Apama for about $25 million in 2005 helped expand its ObjectStore unit.

During fiscal 2006, the company continued to make significant progress on its strategic goal of providing a richer and broader portfolio of products to assist business and IT professionals in developing, deploying, integrating, and managing critical business applications

In early fiscal 2006, Progress Software acquired NEON Systems, a leading provider of mainframe data access and integration software, and Actional Corporation, a provider of service-oriented architecture (SOA) management software.

In June 2006, Progress Software acquired Pantero, the industry's first product to address the real-time semantic data integration challenges through a model-driven approach. In October 2006, the company acquired OpenAccess Software, a provider of development toolkits for rapid development of ODBC and JDBC drivers as well as ADO.NET and OLE DB providers.