Progress Software: SOA Development Leader Raises F2007 Revenue Forecast | AMR Research

Progress Software: SOA Development Leader Raises F2007 Revenue Forecast | AMR Research

IT Management and SOA

Progress progresses

Progress Software just reported 2Q07 results. Revenue rose by 9% (5% in constant-currency terms) to $120 million from $110 million in 2Q06 and relative to consensus expectations of $116 million. Software license revenue increased by 8% (4% in constant-currency terms) to $44.6 million from $41.4 million. GAAP operating income edged up by 3% to $11.3 million from $11.0 million in 2Q06. Net income jumped by 9% to $8.4 million from $7.7 million in the year-ago quarter.

While Progress’ service-oriented architecture (SOA) products represent a small portion of the company’s overall revenue, the SOA product sales are growing at a faster rate than its traditional OpenEdge product suite, which is responsible for the bulk of revenues. Still, Progress is often overlooked as a leader in the development of the SOA market, though not by investors: The shares have outperformed those of its SOA market peers the past year. The SOA products, Sonic, Actional, and DataXtend, have helped the company sell directly into new, lucrative markets for high-end performance systems. The SOA products have helped Progress minimize the loss of VARs to other platforms like those from IBM and Microsoft. Because Progress’ resellers sell predominantly to small and midsize businesses (SMBs), the majority of Progress’ revenue comes from SMB accounts.

However, while Progress offers high-performance SOA enterprise service bus, activity monitoring, and SOA management tools, it does not provide much in the way of business process modeling or enterprise catalog functionality. As a result, Progress’ SOA product is better suited for developers building new Java or OpenEdge applications than for business analysts looking to create SOA composite applications from existing enterprise applications. In order to compete in this market, Progress likely will have to acquire a business process management (BPM) vendor. For more on Progress and what its competitors are doing in this area, see, “Progress Software: SOA Development Leader Raises F2007 Revenue Forecast.”

Progress and the Sound of SOA; QAD Goes SaaS | AMR Research

Progress and the Sound of SOA; QAD Goes SaaS | AMR Research


The halls were alive with the sound of SOA.

While it may be hard to visualize Julie Andrews singing that line as she stood overlooking the countryside near Salzburg, it was the first thing I thought of as I watched a demo at Progress Software’s Partner Exchange 2007 event.

To demonstrate the power of service-oriented architectures (SOAs), Progress set up a demo that linked seven servers. Four of the servers were linked to Yamaha synthesizers, with each device set up to play a custom jazz piece written by Progress’ Dave Olson. The intent of the demo was to show how Progress Sonic’s enterprise service bus (ESB) could be used to orchestrate and coordinate the individual servers so that they could be linked in a seamless fashion. It worked flawlessly, and you didn’t have to be a jazz aficionado to be impressed.

“I feel MIDI”

The idea for the demo was conceived two months ago. It was completed by a single programmer in six weeks. For the most part, it used all off-the-shelf technology that is available today. The one exception was a custom web service called Player that was downloaded from a MIDI Java site (MIDI is an acronym for Musical Instrument Digital Interface). There’s a fair amount of technology hidden in the demo, including a publish-and-subscribe messaging architecture, BPEL for authoring, widespread use of XML documents, and an event backbone. One Progress executive spent over 40 minutes trying to explain to me how it actually worked. He gave up when he realized it would be easier to teach a pig to sing.

Now, replace the Yamaha devices with software from SAP, QAD, Business Objects, PeopleSoft, and MatrixOne. Imagine these five software packages connected seamlessly to Sonic. That’s the heterogeneous architecture that QAD has proposed to one large customer that it shares with SAP. Getting SAP to move from its NetWeaver-only stance, however, will be the real challenge.

QAD has developed two products based on Sonic: Distributed Order Management and Just-in-Time Sequencer. The former was first launched four years ago, while the latter uses Sonic to connect with various shop-floor control systems. More on QAD and Progress later.

Infor, the world’s third largest enterprise applications vendor after SAP and Oracle, is another Sonic supporter. At the event, Infor’s Tom Lynch told me that his company has standardized on Progress as its SOA provider. Infor’s products span a wide range of architectures from .NET to J2EE. Sonic allows it to mix and match Microsoft products, IBM’s WebSphere and hardware platforms, and other third-party integration products.

Progress: A surplus of brands

There’s a lot more to Progress than just Sonic. The company may be best known for its 4GL development environment. The 4GL is at the core of QAD’s ERP applications and is the foundation of several Infor products. It has since morphed into the broader application development platform now known as Progress OpenEdge. There are more than 60,000 OpenEdge customers, including 90% of the Fortune 500.

Progress Apama is one of the newest extensions of the company’s suite. It is designed to aid in complex event processing, but the best way to describe it may be to summarize the demo. A major international stock exchange uses it to identify potential insider trading in individual stocks. Apama tracks suspicious activities or unusual price movements right back to the trading partners. This is then paired with any subsequent announcements that may later cause the share price to rise or fall. The implied linkage being that the buyer or seller had advanced knowledge of good or bad news.

While banks and other financial institutions make up the bulk of Apama users, Manuvis, a small Progress applications partner, uses it to track and resolve events on the factory floor. As I talked to Manuvis and other partners, I immediately developed a whole host of potential applications for retailers and manufacturers too, especially along the extended value chain. These could include managing RFID data, logistics disruptions, or huge volumes of point-of-sale data.

Besides Sonic and Apama, other brands include Progress Actional (web services management and SOA governance), DataDirect Shadow (mainframe integration), DataDirect (data connectivity software), Progress DataXtend (the industry’s first model-driven semantic integration tool), Progress EasyAsk (natural language query tool), and Progress ObjectStore (object data management). All told, Progress delivered more than 30 new products last year.

While at the conference, I had the opportunity to talk to Progress partners about the company. During one session, I had the chance to ask three executives the same question: “If you had 30 minutes with Dave Ireland (president of the OpenEdge business unit), what advice would you give him or what product or service would you ask him to deliver?” All three had the same answer: make Sonic and the other SOA products as easy to configure and extend as OpenEdge.

QAD: Demand for “on demand” up five times in just two months

When I got back from Phoenix, I sent Pam Lopker an e-mail asking if we could talk about Progress and its SOA products. Ms. Lopker and her husband Karl started QAD in 1979. During that time, the customer base has grown to 5,500.

She was joined on the call by Hans Jansen, QAD’s chief technology officer. When asked about Sonic, both had the same response: “It’s a great product. It’s No. 1 in ESB, but no one knows it.”

After talking about SOA for a while, the conversation switched to Apama, and then to Semantic Integrator and the need for semantic mapping before settling on software as a service (SaaS). SaaS, along with SOA and Apama, were the three primary themes at the Progress event.

QAD has offered SaaS software for over five years. Its first on-demand offering was Supplier Visualization, which is used by 2,094 companies. Two months ago the company decided to sell its core QAD Enterprise Applications 2007 (the abbreviated nomenclature is QAD 2007) on premises, on demand, or on an appliance.

Ms. Lopker said that she told her people that the first-year demand for the SaaS version of QAD 2007 would be 10 to 20 small companies, with an average deployment of 5 to 10 seats. All told, she foresaw a total customer base of 100 seats, but she was way off. In less than 60 days, there were 540 users running QAD as a service.

What surprised her most was the amount of interest generated by larger companies, not the small and midsize businesses she expected. Big companies see the on-demand model as faster to implement and upgrade. These same large customers also see it as a faster and less-expensive way of doing instance consolidations and managing divestitures.

We closed the conversation with a brief discussion of QAD’s latest killer app, a desktop shipping product acquired with last summer’s purchase of Precision Software Limited. It allows customers to determine which shipper offers the lowest price, provides track-and-trace functionality, and manages the whole global trade process. The new software has opened many new first-time accounts for QAD, including Google, Apple, and GE.

Software AG Lays Out Its Road Map for Integrating webMethods

Software AG Lays Out Its Road Map for Integrating webMethods

Software AG has completed its acquisition of webMethods and clarified plans for integrating its products. Users should discuss their own plans with the company, to reduce future migration risks.

webMethods

Analyst Reports

webMethods provides business process integration to the world's largest corporations and government agencies. webMethods' flagship product suite, webMethods Fabric, is the only integrated platform to deliver both SOA and BPM, delivering rapid ROI to our 1,500 customers around the globe. With webMethods, customers can take a process-centric approach to their business problems, allowing them to leverage their existing IT assets, dramatically improve business process productivity and ROI, and rapidly create competitive advantage by making their business processes work harder for their company.

SOFTWARE AG COMPLETES ACQUISITION OF WEBMETHODS FOR $546 MILLION

Press Release

Darmstadt, Germany - June 01, 2007 – Software AG, Europe's largest Business Infrastructure Software provider, announced today the successful acquisition of webMethods, Inc. (NASDAQ: WEBM) a leading business integration and optimization software company. With a deal value of $546 million, this merger is one of the largest pure software deals in the history of the European IT industry. The combination creates a new global leader in business infrastructure software with over 4,000 enterprise customers worldwide and is one of the largest independent vendors in the rapidly growing Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Business Process Management (BPM) markets. Software AG announced new financial guidance for 2007 with revenue forecast to rise by 30%-35% compared to 2006 and EPS by €0.50 - €0.65.

- The merger creates a new global leader in Business Infrastructure Software
- New financial guidance for 2007: total revenue growth to reach 30%-35% and Earning Per Share (EPS) to increase by € 0.50 - € 0.65; a major step towards Software AG’s stated goal of doubling revenue to €1 billion by 2011
- Ranks as one of the largest pure software deals in the European IT market