Telerik and Progress – A Developer’s Dream and a Growth Path for the Future

If you want to understand what’s going on with our recent acquisition of Telerik, it’s really simple. They are a company that is just like us – developers that are there for other developers.  And, together we are better.

A little more than two years ago Progress began a journey by announcing a strategic plan that focused on our core competencies, which are application development, data connectivity and integration. Our first job was to focus on our OpenEdge base and give them the products and technologies they needed to get to the next generation of application development, namely mobile, cloud, and data connectivity.

Serving our OpenEdge customers was critical; we wanted to give them exactly what they needed to achieve their objectives, as we had done for 30 years. We knew (and they knew) that we also needed to create a platform for cloud that could support them and a new generation of developers and new kinds of apps. That was the impetus behind acquiring Rollbase, which is a high productivity application platform-as-a-service (aPaaS) that lets you create apps quickly, across platforms, using a simple drag-and-drop approach.

Rollbase has proven to be a fabulous aPaaS and the foundation for Progress Pacific. With the option of multi-tenancy, it is great for ISVs and direct end users. Rollbase is simple, fast and flexible allowing users to create applications quickly, deploy them anywhere and manage them with ease.

That was a good start on the journey for Progress and our developer community, but there was more to come.  We always knew that we wanted to appeal to a larger set of developers and the market need was emerging around creating apps in Node.js. That led us to Modulus, which is a growth story in itself (see Progress, Modulus, and the Node.js opportunity). The Modulus platform is a premier hosting platform that provides a complete technology

stack for application developers. We have nearly doubled the number of customers on the platform since acquisition.

Terrific Telerik

Telerik further complements everything we have done to date. They have development tools, cloud tools, application lifecycle management, and the powerful Sitefinity Content Management System.

These are capabilities with depth – including, for example, UI widgets to help make a “beautiful” app and a visionary mobile app dev platform that takes that beautification into the cloud and onto mobile devices. They even have collaboration tools.

Combined with Telerik, Progress becomes a destination site for the largest developer population on the planet spanning ABL, .NET, Java, JavaScript, Node.js and mobile.

As a result, we now have just about everything developers need to create beautiful applications that can be deployed anywhere.  Now that Telerik and Progress are one company, I am truly excited about the breadth of our offerings and the endless opportunities that this creates for our customers.