The Spark is on Fire at Progress

After an incredible four days at Progress Exchange 2013, we are ready to take the insight gained from our customers and partners and plan an even better event for the coming year. This year’s event was filled with informative sessions, great keynotes, product launches, and even little fun—as well as an opportunity for us to ignite the spark of change into a flame.

For those who were not able to make the trip, or would just like to refresh on the whirlwind week, take a look at all the happenings from this year’s event.

We had a number of announcements during Progress Exchange, ranging from new product features, new leadership, to a brand new community.

Progress Pacific

We debuted some exciting new features for our platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution, Progress Pacific. Going beyond the basics, Progress Pacific users will now be able to maximize productivity, with faster implementation and easier workflows—in addition to spending less time worrying about technology and writing code. Get the details on these new capabilities here.

Macintosh Retail Group

In addition to the new Progress Pacific features, we were proud to announce that Macintosh Retail Group has become our newest Progress Pacific user. In an effort to modernize key systems, they will deploy Pacific across all channels and create the same seamless brand experience for customers. Find out more here.

Progress Global Small and Medium Sized Enterprise (SME) Growth Study

In conjunction with IDG Research Services, we also released our Global SME Growth study that surveyed 300 key decision-makers across the U.S. and Europe about their biggest business challenges and key goals. Most notably, we found that customer experience is crucial for SME growth, with 74% seeking to improve customer experience and the delivery of value added services. Read more here.

Click to tweet: 74% of #SMEs are seeking to improve customer experience according to @ProgressSW & @IDGResearch.

New Community Forum

We were especially excited to launch our new community forum for customers and partners. In order to help empower our users, we created an open community forum designed to enable developers to access and share relevant technical and business content. Find out more here.

Data Integration Business Leadership

Finally, we welcomed former DataFlux CEO and SAS Executive, Tony Fisher to lead the Progress data integration business. In this role, Fisher will be responsible for our DataDirect Cloud connectivity service, DataDirect Connect high performance data connectivity software and an innovative new self-service data integration offering that will be available from Progress near the end of this year. More on Fisher’s new role here.

What You’ve Said about Exchange

We are so grateful to everyone who took the time to travel to Boston to experience this event and cannot wait to share it again with you in 2014! Check out pictures from Progress Exchange 2013 on our Facebook page, and get the daily event breakdown here and here.