Simplifying the world through PROGRESS SOFTWARE Date:   Monday , August 16, 2010 Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS), a global software company builds products to enable enterprises to be operationally responsive to changing business conditions and customer interactions, as they occur. Enabling businesses to capitalize on new opportunities drive greater efficiencies and reduce risk. Enterprises today constantly seek to attain the highest level of business performance. Progress Software brands this aspiration as ‘Operational Responsiveness’. According to an independent study from research firm Vanson Bourne, most businesses have a long way to go before they are able to respond to market or customer changes quickly enough to be competitive. This could be because of any of the following reasons - lack of visibility, information overload, and lack of control. Progress Software, which started out with a single flagship product, OpenEdge, today has multiple products - all aligned towards enabling Operational Responsiveness in Enterprises. The Progress portfolio spans event-driven visibility and realtime response, open integration, data access and integration, and application development and deployment. Progress was the first to offer the Enterprise Service Bus and Complex Event Processing Technology, and is continually creating innovative new technologies in emerging areas. And now, Progress Software has launched its new product strategy- Responsive Process Management (RPM) - a new paradigm in realizing visibility and control that enterprises need to be Operationally Responsive. Operational Responsiveness means responding immediately to events, changing conditions, and customer actions with a minimum of extra steps or mistakes, so business gets done quickly and effectively. It is more of agility than business process optimization. It’s about plugging decision makers at every level into business activities and giving them the ability to respond to the unexpected and effect change directly. Ramesh Loganathan, VP (Products) & Center head, PSI says “Responsive Process Management (RPM) as an approach will enable Operational Responsiveness through real-time, comprehensive visibility into any combination of processes, transactions, events, and system-level information. Thus allowing organizations to determine what’s working and what’s not and accordingly take any needed remedial action.And all of this will be proactive”. With so many of business processes embedded in business technology, incorporating operational responsiveness into business is both an opportunity and a necessity: opportunity because technology investments can and should be conceived and designed to deliver better responsiveness across the business, and a necessity because a business needs to constantly improve responsiveness to remain competitive. Making the most of any opportunity, driving efficiency, reducing risk— these are the basic tenets of business competition. Doing any of these well requires creating, measuring, and evolving business processes- effectively responding to changes in the business environment. When a new market opportunity is identified, an agile business can respond quickly and adapt its processes to capture that revenue. For example, traders can quickly implement new trading algorithms to leverage small windows of opportunity. Continuous Process Improvement is another imperative agile businesses face. When inefficiencies are discovered, an efficient business can fine-tune its operations to eliminate them. For example, supply chain managers can adapt to changing suppliers by modifying their approach to placing orders to eliminate excess costs or inventory.An operationally responsive business can take this even further and quickly adjust how it works with each individual supplier on a daily or even hourly basis, if necessary. Progress believes RPM as a product suite has a distinctive value proposition and in the next two years will make great headway into more and more companies. And may even soon become an independent product category that other distributed enterprise infrastructure companies may also follow suite with. Progress Software has made great strides since its inception and has become one of the leaders in the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) field. Progress Software has always delivered superior software products and services. Worldwide, the company’s customer base is vast, with nearly 1,40,000 organizations spread across 180 countries, 70 percent of these being the Fortune 100 companies. Its current customers fit into many domains ranging from telecom to financial services, retail manufacturing and government. Today, Progress is the foremost enterprise software provider that empowers business leaders to anticipate and respond to threats and opportunities all from one interface. Presently it is RPM that seems to be creating waves in the market. With passing time, the company will only see more progress in its name. Progress in India Progress has its largest Product Development center outside the U.S., based out of Hyderabad. It also has development centers in Mumbai and Coimbatore, and regional sales organization based out of Mumbai. Progress Software India (PSI) started its operation in Hyderabad in the year 2005. PSI is structured on a Centre of Expertise(COE) model, where groups are aligned around technology horizontals that work on multiple products/ components within each horizontal. Present technologies include Eclipse based Development tools, Web portal and web based tooling and Adapters. In recent years PSI has contributed significantly towards the development of front-line products including Sonic, Actional, DataXtend, DataDirect, OpenEdge and Apama. Over the past two years it has also participated actively in the initiative to integrate the product portfolio. “PSI has consistently delivered high value product engineering,while also driving the technology direction for the company in few key areas like Development Tools and Integration adapters. We are now actively participating in the still evolving new product strategy- RPM. The Hyderabad center nowhas about 170 engineers and is on a steep expansion plan” says Mr. Loganathan. In the two years since the sales operations started in India, the products have been taken very well, especially in India. Apama, Actional and the RPM Suite in particular have gained some very good traction.