Progress + Kemp: The Benefits of Application Experience for your High-Impact Applications

What if you took application experience (AX) and added it to the best of digital experience, application development, data connectivity, DevOps and more? You’d get Progress that’s built around you.

With the addition of Kemp, Progress is strengthening its management offerings within its extended portfolio of products to develop, deploy and manage high impact applications, offering tremendous benefit to businesses looking to differentiate themselves through the customer experience.

In today’s marketplaces across all verticals, customers have more options than ever before. This wealth of choice combined with access to information creates challenges for organizations in the business of providing services to customers, to maintain a competitive edge.

The days of having only a single vendor that could service your business’ needs are a thing of the past. As a result, there has been a decline in the ability of service providers to differentiate, based on incremental advantage in features and capabilities.

However, this trend has also created new opportunities.

The Value of Experience

It’s been said in recent times that “experience”—be it user, customer or employee—is the last battleground of differentiation. The importance of experience becomes clear when we consider interactions with day-to-day services. Take for example, arriving at the airport for a trip, only to be greeted by an understaffed airline desk with a queue that wraps around five times. Add to that, then seeing your baggage get kicked around like a football—this would generally be considered bad service. However, getting to instantly upgrade your flight ticket afterwards on an easy-to-use app at the price you want could almost make up for it all.

That’s the point—the experience that customers have can change their perception of the services that they consume. This perception is what allows providers to increase customer satisfaction, create opportunities to deliver additional value-add services and retain their clients. The importance of this, is why the trend of putting focus on user experience, customer experience and application experience at the leadership levels of organizations is gaining traction.

Application Experience Defined

Progress has a long history of delivering to its customers the right products to develop the applications they need, deploy where and how they want and manage it all safely and securely. This focus on facilitating great experiences created a natural match for the acquisition of Kemp. The Kemp product portfolio is centered on enabling complete control over post-deployment application experience (AX) and therefore strengthens Progress’ management offerings.

At its simplest, AX is the sum of the interactions that customers have with the applications and services that a business publishes and manages for end users. Because it’s linked to how customers—whether external or internal—view the value of what’s being delivered, it’s imperative for the operations teams that manage them to be properly equipped to get it right.

They need to always have access to the true state of their distributed environments, have strong feedback loops based on real-time insights and control over adaptive pipelines that can be leveraged to make changes that avert negative customer usage experiences.

Good AX is defined by applications and services that are highly available, secure and optimized to perform above expectations. It’s about enabling customers to control client experience when they’re accessing critical business applications and helping operations teams to get ahead of developing issues before they have a tangible impact.

The Shape of the Future

The beauty of Progress + Kemp is that we’ve now expanded upon an already strong product portfolio—a portfolio that collectively spans across a much wider range of the application lifecycle than otherwise would be possible. Progress is a leader in App Dev, DevOps, Digital Experience, Data Connectivity and now adds Application Experience, giving operations teams greater, consolidated control.

For the enterprise, the Progress product portfolio enables the development of high-impact apps and web experiences combined with tooling to automate the business processes that support them. The addition of Kemp builds on the infrastructure monitoring product family with additional Day 2 infrastructure operations products that ensure the platforms that applications need to function are highly available and secure. Over time, we envision the creation of feedback loops that allow the state of an ecosystem’s AX to influence the workflows associated with upstream processes.

As an example, the performance seen from a user’s perspective or network monitoring toolset should have a direct impact on the delivery pipeline for the next build and release of the application being accessed. Similarly, the security risk profile of new modules and tools added to a web application’s delivery pipeline should automatically drive the implementation of infrastructure prerequisites to support and secure access to the added functionality. The diversity and strength of our portfolio now makes this possible.

Having nearly a decade of experience at Kemp, helping customers deliver business-critical applications, I’m stoked about the opportunities that being part of the Progress family now bring for architecting new customer value. I’m equally excited about the diverse, yet complementary product portfolio that we will craft together in new and innovative ways.

Connecting the dots between Digital Experience and Application Experience means that we will be able to help our customers tackle a wider range of business challenges, deliver on the needs of their end users and maintain a competitive edge. Experience is everything, and we’re committed to helping our customers deliver the best for their end users.

I can’t wait to see what we discover and build together …

Stay tuned!