A couple of months back I had a brief Twitter exchange with David Bressler of Progress Software (@djbressler), following a comment I'd seen from Judith Hurwitz (@jhurwitz) at Progress' analyst day regarding the lack of brand awareness that the company has out there in industry. What I said was: "Progress is a bit like Unilever - top-level brand is vanilla, sub-brands have chops". What I meant is that these days, there's little knowledge of what Progress does (a typical response is either "Who?" or possibly "oh, they used to sell a 4GL and a database in the 1990s, didn't they") - whereas there's much more recognition of brands like Sonic (SOA infrastructure), Actional (SOA management / governance), IONA (middleware, SOA infrastructure), Apama (event processing), DataXtend (data integration) and DataDirect (data connectivity, legacy application integration).
David replied that Progress is a technology company's company - which is absolutely correct: Progress has a long and successful history of providing a platform for other software vendors to embed in their application offerings. And he followed up with this blog entry, saying "We'd love for the Progress brand to have some chops, and we're trying but it's not trivial."
Well, for a few weeks I'd been meaning to write a blog post of my own exploring this - but in the general headlong rush that we've been experiencing so far this year, I'd forgotten to write that post. When I saw today's news that there's been a change at the top at Progress, though, I was finally prompted to write some thoughts down. (Thanks for the pointer Miko).
The main thought in my head all those weeks ago was that it's all very well for Progress to be a bit like Unilever - with the sub-brands (Sonic, Actional, Apama, DataDirect, and so on) having much more visibility in industry than the parent brand - as long as the company doesn't want to start pulling together broader IT and business infrastructure propositions that tie together pieces from the different brands. Unilever is well-known for owning a vast portfolio of products, many of which actually compete with others in the portfolio (Dove v Lux; or Persil v Surf, for example). The invisibility of the parent brand is fine for Unilever, but it's bad news for Progress if it wants to really make the most of its potential within enterprises (by cross-selling or bundling its products to help customers with broader opportunities, for example).
So this is the point where the company has to undergo a pretty radical shift. As reported in PCWorld, the new Progress Software CEO (formerly the COO) has established a target of doubling the company's annual revenue to around $1bn, by "reorienting sales towards multi-product suites, as well as aiming marketing messages more at business executives than IT workers" - that is, precisely what it's not currently suited to doing.
This goal makes absolute sense, and in fact it has made sense for ages. The majority of the markets where Progress' brands play are growth markets where there's real opportunity, right now; and what's more, the combination of the offerings could have real power, too.
The required shift will be no picnic, but there are worse times for Progress to be trying to make it happen. There's a new man at the top with a new broom, no doubt; and what's more, there's still a small window of opportunity open for another medium-to-large-sized specialist infrastructure software vendor to pick up business, following BEA's acquisition by Oracle a few months back. TIBCO and Software AG have recently been making much of BEA's disappearance as an "independent" infrastructure software vendor, and it's surely no coincidence that both these companies also have aspirations to reach $1bn in annual revenues (Software AG has been particularly vocal about this of late - it's just reached the $1bn mark following its acquisition of webMethods). Progress has long had the potential to join Software AG and TIBCO as a serious contender for enterprises wanting to avoid getting into bed with the MISO pack (Microsoft, IBM, SAP or Oracle) for whatever reason, but until now it just never seemed to be able to be bothered to do what was necessary.
With a new CEO at the top, it'll be fascinating to see whether Progress can move up a gear. If it succeeds, then enterprises wanting to avoid giving too much technology supplier power to the MISO pack may well have a new choice - and in a market where consolidation has recently been rampant, more choice would be refreshing for everyone.
David replied that Progress is a technology company's company - which is absolutely correct: Progress has a long and successful history of providing a platform for other software vendors to embed in their application offerings. And he followed up with this blog entry, saying "We'd love for the Progress brand to have some chops, and we're trying but it's not trivial."
Well, for a few weeks I'd been meaning to write a blog post of my own exploring this - but in the general headlong rush that we've been experiencing so far this year, I'd forgotten to write that post. When I saw today's news that there's been a change at the top at Progress, though, I was finally prompted to write some thoughts down. (Thanks for the pointer Miko).
The main thought in my head all those weeks ago was that it's all very well for Progress to be a bit like Unilever - with the sub-brands (Sonic, Actional, Apama, DataDirect, and so on) having much more visibility in industry than the parent brand - as long as the company doesn't want to start pulling together broader IT and business infrastructure propositions that tie together pieces from the different brands. Unilever is well-known for owning a vast portfolio of products, many of which actually compete with others in the portfolio (Dove v Lux; or Persil v Surf, for example). The invisibility of the parent brand is fine for Unilever, but it's bad news for Progress if it wants to really make the most of its potential within enterprises (by cross-selling or bundling its products to help customers with broader opportunities, for example).
So this is the point where the company has to undergo a pretty radical shift. As reported in PCWorld, the new Progress Software CEO (formerly the COO) has established a target of doubling the company's annual revenue to around $1bn, by "reorienting sales towards multi-product suites, as well as aiming marketing messages more at business executives than IT workers" - that is, precisely what it's not currently suited to doing.
This goal makes absolute sense, and in fact it has made sense for ages. The majority of the markets where Progress' brands play are growth markets where there's real opportunity, right now; and what's more, the combination of the offerings could have real power, too.
The required shift will be no picnic, but there are worse times for Progress to be trying to make it happen. There's a new man at the top with a new broom, no doubt; and what's more, there's still a small window of opportunity open for another medium-to-large-sized specialist infrastructure software vendor to pick up business, following BEA's acquisition by Oracle a few months back. TIBCO and Software AG have recently been making much of BEA's disappearance as an "independent" infrastructure software vendor, and it's surely no coincidence that both these companies also have aspirations to reach $1bn in annual revenues (Software AG has been particularly vocal about this of late - it's just reached the $1bn mark following its acquisition of webMethods). Progress has long had the potential to join Software AG and TIBCO as a serious contender for enterprises wanting to avoid getting into bed with the MISO pack (Microsoft, IBM, SAP or Oracle) for whatever reason, but until now it just never seemed to be able to be bothered to do what was necessary.
With a new CEO at the top, it'll be fascinating to see whether Progress can move up a gear. If it succeeds, then enterprises wanting to avoid giving too much technology supplier power to the MISO pack may well have a new choice - and in a market where consolidation has recently been rampant, more choice would be refreshing for everyone.
Neil,
You've really said it quite well, and I have nothing to add, but to say that I really believe Rick is the guy for the job. I just wanted to put that out there, not to suck up, but to make sure that silence on this matter when I'm so vocal on so much would not be perceived as a lack of faith.
Rick has a great communications style, and I'm looking forward to his influence trickling down even more now that he's our fearless leader.
I think it's been quite a while since we spoke... we've also brought on industry veteran Gary Conway to be our CMO (http://bit.ly/LZWQ), a new position to tie it all together under the Progress brand. So, we're putting our money where our mouth is and taking this very seriously!
Cheers,
David Bressler
Progress Software (Actional)
My software company was a Progress OEM for six years and our application development benefited in every way from the quality development tools, steady roll-out of product improvements, features and functions that were unmatched by Oracle, Sybase, Informix (other options for us to use) and superb customer services. When I sold the application to another firm, it was a sore disappointment that the Progress brand and lack of broad market presence caused the buyers to move off the Progress platform. I still believe it was the best tool set for the complex applications we were developing that relied on sophisticated embedded search.
I hope Progress growth continues while the brand flourishes under Bressler. I remain a big fan of the company.
Neil / David - as the former GM of the Apama division at Progress, and the participant in seemingly hundreds of hours of meetings about branding at Progress, I think you have the issue the company faces nailed. However, the appropriate actions are much more complicated than "let's start to brand Progress as Progress" - in fact, that would be the wrong thing to do, because that's not their strategy!
Progress can't establish its brand because their product strategy is balkanized - on purpose. That is, as I would often say tongue-in-cheek, that company's offering was more like a yard sale than one-stop shopping. Indeed, this was Joe's strategy to combat the perceived competition that Progress has - Oracle, IBM, TIBCO, etc. - out innovate them with one of their many products. Balkanized go-to-market functions have created a fragmented competitive landscape for Progress. That is, corporate-wide, 80%-90% of the time Progress sales competes, it's against a different foe - Sonic ESB competes against pure-play SOA vendors, Sonic MQ competes against other JMS implementations, Apama competes against other CEP companies, Data Direct competes against vendor-developed JDBC drivers. DataXtend competes against other database caching technologies. OpenEdge, which is the majority of their business, doesn't compete - it's a legacy business.
In other words, Progress has no single competitor today, and therefore can not unify branding, because it would be a disaster in the field. I remember one of the VP's of sales at Data Direct, when we decided the corporate mission statement was going to be about SOA, he said: "if any of my sales people even mention SOA they will be fired!!!" - he was right. And herein lies the rub.
That's why there are really only 3 choices for Progress, each tenuous: 1) Tear down the entire product strategy, integrate the product offerings (this will take 3-5 years), then brand Progress, 2) Keep the products independent, and let them compete on their own, or 3) Pick one or two horses and bet big. That is - decide that the future will be SOA, or event processing, or whatever.
Until now, Progress has suffered because even though Joe was clear on his choice (strategy #2 - balkanization), the culture at Progress allowed perpetual and distracting debate, even vicious infighting. Rick now gets to choose, and it's a hard choice. Clearly he was brought there to effect change, and I think he's going to attempt to implement choice #1. But the devil is in the details of that choice - which products get unified? Does he tear down the success, for example, Apama had as a pure-play CEP in favor of integrating it into a SOA stack? Which ESB horse does he bet on, Sonic or IONA? And what happens with Data Direct - does he keep it in a silo? And on and on.
I'm typically a glass half full kind of guy, but in the case of Progress, I think the only good detailed choices around unification lead to a very weak company. The fact of the matter is that the products one would chose for a "unified strategy" only make Progress into a bottom-tier SOA player, probably #6-#10 depending on how you count competitors, with a sales force that needs to be completely re-vamped and no consulting presence, that would need to be rebuilt. That said, the real answer beyond the short-term decisions is what does Progress do AFTER they make that choice - and I don't mean basic operational stuff like what products they build. Progress needs to make bold M&A choices. The stuff they have now can't carry them forward, and that's going to be Rick's true test.
I like Rick and agree with David's enthusiasm for him personally. Progress has some GREAT technology, and great people. He's one of the most ethical and smart people I know. IS the right person to get the best out of what Progress has, and wish him the very best of luck!
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. Progress Software is, effectively, a conglomerate of attractive technologies, but they don't resonate as a unified brand or family in the minds of customers. Kudos to Mark for commenting and shedding some light on the thinking in Bedford.
The OpenEdge platform, which brought Progress Software to the point where it could acquire these other technologies and become a Unilever, has been an embedded technology from day one. Progress Software provided the business programming language and database that allowed thousands of Progress Application Partners to produce successful vertical market software. These APs love the Progress 4GL platform, but due to the embedded nature of the tool, the customers were completely unaware of the engine that was powering their supply chain management or enterprise accounting or travel management systems. At the time, they didn't really care as they were more focused on the results rather than the technology.
As technology matured and platform leaders emerged, these very same customers began requiring their vendors to reassure them the technology was a safe choice or less costly by demanding Microsoft or Oracle. It didn't matter so much which components were Microsoft or Oracle or even how much of the solution relied on one of these two. Progress APs, those thousands of SaaS customers you talk about, have since struggled to convince prospects that the Progress OpenEdge platform, something they've never heard of, is a safe bet and they won't need to worry they can't find OpenEdge-savvy staff to maintain it.
You won't find a single Progress AP who wouldn't love a brand or a technology family name that prospects would recognize and see as genuine competitors for the likes of Microsoft and Oracle. So long as the development and support staff could still enjoy the ease, power and lower TCO of OpenEdge, the sales staff would perform significantly better if the Progress moniker was recognizable and competitive in the small- and mid-market.
I can only imagine that the VARs and solution providers in the other subsidiaries at Progress will discover the same issue: they don't get the benefits of any other division's product's credibility as no prospective customer will know the products are related until they are educated by the sales team. We all know that's too late.
Mark Palmer’s comment has characterized the paths Progress Software must choose from to resolve this problem. From an outsider's perspective, the choice of ripping out the current names and unifying under one banner does seem to be the best long term decision. If Progress Software can successfully accomplish that daunting task, the VARs and APs in each division could count on greater credibility and customer awareness. However, from the perspective of a Application Partner Business Council member, the idea that it will take another fives years and yet another new moniker before I can count on Progress Software to aid versus hinder in my sales effort is not encouraging. Most APs have already added some technology component from other, more recognizable names and a huge rebranding that takes years to provide benefits will likely cause them to consider looking elsewhere.
The software development companies who have invested in developing with OpenEdge, those who I would argue are the core of Progress Software's success, genuinely love the products. They have been successful in selling their vertical market solutions despite the "Progress Who?" problem and the maintenance revenue from those hundreds of thousands of licenses represents the majority of Progress Software revenue. Rick will have to convince the AP community that the long term goals are worth waiting for and preserve the maintenance revenue from OpenEdge to get Progress Software through to a unified, recognized brand that appears earlier in the buy cycle. That’s a tall order by any measure.
Doug Lucy
AP Business Council
http://www.apbusinesscouncil.org