A Letter from our CEO, Yogesh Gupta

Yesterday, we released our Q4 and FY16 results and made a number of announcements that will significantly change the shape and future of Progress. 

In my first 90 days, I’ve spoken with dozens of partners and customers listening to what they need from us, and I’ve traveled to our key offices around the globe, to gain insights from the broader Progress team. What I’ve confirmed is that our products are core to the success of our customers. However, these products alone are no longer a growth engine. We need a growth strategy that enables us to better leverage our product, customer and partner relationships, as well as our go-to-market capabilities and strengths.

To drive growth for the company, we will create, sell and support the leading integrated platform for building Cognitive Applications. We are living in a world where everything is connected and everything is generating data. The number of devices for which applications need to be built and which generate data for the enterprise is increasing at exponential rates. Cognitive Apps are the future, they learn business characteristics and behavior from this data, and businesses realize that leveraging data is their key competitive advantage going forward.

Our mission is clear: we will provide the application development platform and tools that enterprises need to build Cognitive Applications, the business applications of tomorrow.

How do we accomplish our new mission? By executing on a two-pronged strategy. 

• First, we will strengthen our core product lines—OpenEdge, DataDirect, DevTools, Sitefinity, Corticon, Rollbase, ALM and Telerik Platform. We take great pride in the fact that we have thousands of customers and partners who have relied on our solutions to build mission-critical applications. Going forward, we will be laser focused on ensuring that we meet their requirements and address their pain points.

• Second, we will deliver an open and standards-based full-stack JavaScript platform that will make it easy for the broader market to build Cognitive Applications. It will include the following five capabilities:

1. UI tools for modern user interactions
2. A mission-critical back-end-as-a-service platform that runs on any cloud, is secure, high-performant, and highly-scalable, while supporting all modern user interfaces
3. Automated and intuitive capabilities that democratize machine learning for the creation and delivery of Cognitive Apps
4. Data connectivity capabilities to integrate systems of record, IoT and big data
5. Easy to use business logic and rules capabilities

Imagine – the company that pioneered the most compelling model for application development now democratizing machine learning and cognitive applications for its partners and customers.

Even though our platform will have new and innovative capabilities, it will integrate with and leverage our core product portfolio, including NativeScript and our UI tools including Kendo UI, our data connectivity products, OpenEdge database, business logic and our rules engine. The fact that our core technologies will be a key part of our Cognitive Applications platform is what makes it the right strategy for us.

My Call to Action!

We will execute on this strategy efficiently and with agility. We will run lean and be entrepreneurial. To run lean, we will identify those things that we must do to succeed and do them exceptionally well. We must create an organization with clear accountability. We must simplify our processes and we will not do those things that are not core to our strategy. We are also implementing a simplified organizational structure.

Although this is a time of transition, many things in our business remain constant. First and foremost is our commitment to our customers and partners and their success. We have before us a unique opportunity to build the technology company of the future. It will be a company that is true to its roots and takes advantage of an emerging growth market.

Please stay tuned as details unfold.