Progress Software Australia names Pulse Mining Systems Partner of the Year

Sydney, 28 February 2008…Pulse Mining Systems has scooped the pool at the annual Progress Software Partner Awards night in Australia, winning both the Partner of the Year prize for 2007 and the Partner Collaboration Award.

Progress Software Managing Director, Jeremy Goddard, said the awards recognise the tremendous advances Pulse has made over the past two years, despite the upheaval of a management buy-out in April 2006.

“Pulse has achieved significant growth over the past two years, more than doubling in size, and all this during a time of enormous change. These awards are well deserved and we congratulate the Pulse team on the way they are running the business and their commitment to continuous innovation and transformation,” he said.

Based at Thornton, in the heart of the Hunter Valley Coalfields, Pulse Mining Systems has been providing cost-effective ERP systems to the mining sector for over 25 years. Its integrated, best-of-breed solution, based on the Progress platform since 1992, covers every aspect of a commercial mining operation, including Financial Management, Human Resources, Maintenance, Supply, Production and Marketing.

Pulse Director, Mark Schroder, said the company is one of only a few to specialise solely in ERP systems for the mining industry, allowing it to develop closer relationships with clients based on their mutual experience and understanding.

“We have a very loyal customer base and differentiate ourselves not only through our in-depth knowledge of our clients’ needs, but also through our ability to respond very quickly to their changing requirements, thanks to the flexibility of the Progress environment and tools,” he said.

“We’ve found Progress very easy to do business with and we work closely with their software engineers to drive development, incorporate new initiatives as they become available and then stretch them as far as possible.

“The Collaboration Award recognises the value of this close working relationship while the Partner of the Year Award recognises not only our growth in licence sales last year, but also our long term vision for the company,” Mr Schroder explained.

“After our management buy-out, I recognised that we needed to expand the level of business expertise amongst our senior executives. Progress came to the fore with its Business Empowerment program, which provided us with specialised guidance and mentoring to help us improve our business planning and develop a roadmap for where we wanted to take the company.”

Pulse has increased from 23 employees two years ago to 38 today, and has just moved into new, purpose-built premises with capacity for 55 staff in the Hunter Valley.

The company undertakes very little marketing, with most new business coming to Pulse either through word of mouth or as a result of customer expansion, since many of the company’s mining customers operate multiple sites. While the majority of Pulse’s customers are based in Australia, a growing number are located overseas, such as a remote gold mine in Africa and a copper mine in the Philippines.

“One of our newest customers is Carmen Copper at Cebu in the Philippines, a large operation with nearly 5,000 employees that produces 45,000 tonnes of product per day. There is significant potential for this sale to lead to additional work since Carmen’s parent company has other mining interests across the region.”

Mr Schroder said the Progress awards will strengthen the company’s positioning as an employer of choice, improving its ability to recruit additional staff to support its ongoing growth.

“We currently have more work than we can handle with existing numbers and expect our strong expansion to continue for the foreseeable future,” he said.

About Progress Software Corporation

Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS) provides application infrastructure software for the development, deployment, integration and management of business applications. Our goal is to maximize the benefits of information technology while minimizing its complexity and total cost of ownership. Progress can be reached at www.progress.com.

For further information, please contact: