OpenEdge—Core to Progress
On January 16th Progress made some major announcements. As part of our OpenEdge family, I wanted to personally reach out to each of you to provide more information and clarity into our future strategy. Many of you have been users of Progress products for a very long time and I want to reiterate our commitment to you and to the OpenEdge platform.
I have spent much of my first 90 days as the new CEO of Progress, speaking with dozens of you, listening to what you need from us. I have also traveled around the globe to our key offices to gain insights from the broader Progress team. What I’ve confirmed is that our products are core to the success of our customers and our business. However, these products alone are not enough to be the only growth engine for our customers, partners or our business.
We need a growth strategy that enables us to leverage our products, go-to-market capabilities and strengths and exceptional customer and partner relationships. The purpose of the recent restructuring is to ensure that we are organized and staffed appropriately for future success—the type of success you all are hoping for Progress to accomplish.
Investing in OpenEdge
Let me start off by being perfectly clear: I realize that OpenEdge is absolutely critical to your business. It is also critical to the long-term success of Progress. For years it has excelled at providing a robust and stable platform for application developers to build mission critical business applications, quickly and easily. As a go forward strategy our investment in OpenEdge will deliver on the mission that we set forth over 35 years ago: To help our customers and partners build the world’s best business applications. We will continue to enhance OpenEdge to ensure that we fulfill on that promise. However, as the world has changed, so have the requirements for building business applications. It is the next generation of business application development that I would like to see Progress undertake. As a result, while we continue to invest in the capabilities that are important to all of you, we will also invest in a growth strategy that enables us to leverage our current product capabilities and strengths to deliver on the new types of application development that are important to many of our customers and partners.
Product Offering
The OpenEdge product team has been listening intently to each of you—whether through Progress User Group events, our Customer Advisory Board or Partner Advisory Council, or just individual meetings. Based on your input, we are developing a roadmap that I am confident will address many of the current pain-points associated with developing or running business applications in the 21st century. Focus areas include: Always On, Cloud Deployments, Embedded Analytics and Data Replication/Management to name a few. We have already begun planning for the next major release, OpenEdge 12, as well as continuing enhancements to our current/supported versions of the software. I am confident that our recently announced restructuring will put Progress in the strongest position possible to execute on our two pronged strategy: First, to focus on our core products, and second, to deliver on a new mission squarely in the sweet spot of Progress and our heritage—to provide the application development platform and tools that enterprises need to build and deploy the business applications of tomorrow.
A Dedicated Focus
We will execute on this strategy efficiently and with agility. We will run lean and be entrepreneurial in our execution, while making it easy to do business with us. To run lean, we will identify the things that we must do to succeed and do them exceptionally well. We must simplify our processes and we will make sure that we are supporting you, our customers and partners, with the accountability needed to show that we are in this together. I want to reiterate our commitment to your success and to work together, as we have for many years. One thing I have realized in my first 90 days here at Progress is that one of the most significant assets this company has other than great employees and products—is YOU. Your loyalty, transparency and partnership over the past years has been invaluable and we hope to see that continue for many more years into the future.
Thank you for your continued support.
Yogesh Gupta
A technologist at heart, Progress Chief Executive Officer Yogesh Gupta is passionate about how technology can make life simpler—both in the workplace and at home. He brings an infectious energy to work each day, defining company strategy and direction, gaining alignment and ensuring each team has what it needs to execute. His goal is for Progress to be a powerful voice in fueling marketplace transformation.