In the current digital age, adopting the right set of technology solutions is a necessity in order to grow the business. Progress is a leading technology solution provider helping organizations to accelerate their growth. Rajeev Ranjan, Editor, Digital Terminal recently talked to Mr. John Yang, Vice President - Sales, APJ, Progress. He shared important insights about their offerings, market scenario, growth plans and etc. Read the full conversation below.
Rajeev: Please tell about the Progress and its operations across India and APJ market.
John: Progress is a Global Enterprise Software company. So, progress has a mission to help, develop, deploy, and manage high-impact applications. Progress has over 40 years of history and Progress has been a publicly listed company for over 30 years. We will pass six million business users working with Progress Technologies to support their business applications. Over thousands of companies operate their business systems on Progress platforms. So, we have more than 1700 customers from the category of software companies that build their products on top of progress products.
We are over 600 million in revenue and profitability. We invest over 20% back into research and development to make sure we sustain our customer value. In India, Hyderabad has been home to our first India office since 2005. From there on we have continuously expanded our India operations. Today we have Hyderabad, Bengaluru, and New Delhi where we operate and where we have Research and Development centers. So, they are really strategic Innovation hubs and they play a key role in our Global success.
Rajeev: Can you please brief about your product offerings in the Indian market?
John: For us, India is a tech-savvy market and a very fast-growing market. Let’s talk about some examples, there are many developers in India today who use Progress front-end development tools on a daily basis. And leading enterprise and financial institutions in India build their website and their customer experience applications based on progress Affinity which is a very well-engineered DXP platform. So, we have a product called 'Move It' which is a secure managed file transfer solution. It is widely used by many Indian businesses already and we are growing that.
We can see that there are ongoing IT infrastructure build-ups in every part of India. So, that brings us to the progress Suite of infrastructure management software that is gaining traction. We talk about a few of those offerings like a product named low master which is doing application load balancing. And, a product called 'Chef' which is in DevOps and DevSecOps, and WhatsUp Gold and Floor which is helping customers to do their infrastructure and network monitoring and gain observability to their IT systems. So, these products ran across customers’ application lifestyle cycles from development to deployment and management and the cycle journey.
Rajeev: How do you see the way enterprises and SMEs are embracing digital transformation?
John: This is the great time to fight because India’s Digital Economy shooting for one trillion USD by 2025, which is really like 20-25% of the target economy needs to be the digital economy. So, that is what we hear, and super excited about that. India is gaining investment in infrastructure, we have seen the kind of increase in the ease of doing business in India. India has got a very favorable demographic and strategic direction to go to Digital Economy. I think that the Digital economy trend in India will definitely help every industry and also for enterprises and SMEs. And this will result in more jobs in India when there is an increase in entrepreneurship, and also kind of like economic and social kind of growth. So, I think that’s what I see as the digital economy for India.
Rajeev: How was the year 2022 for Progress? Can you please highlight some achievements?
John: In 2022, progress had a very important acquisition completed. We acquired MarkLogic, the leading solution for managing big large complex data sets and managing metadata. It augmented the Progress position in offering the best tech throughout the application life cycle. Speaking for my territory, Asia Pacific for 2022, we were proud to completely come out of the covid impacts. And, we achieved our record fiscal year for this region. It demonstrated that we were able to retain not just retain but grow our customer base during those tough times. We didn’t lose customers we grow more customers.
So, that’s why we were able to hit very good results. It’s a testimonial that we were able to deliver all that. The economy wasn’t great over the past few years but if you are able to deliver value and if your customer trusted it, trusts you and they have accepted it, that’s how in the end your business results can be. So, it’s not easy, but we were very happy and proud to have been achieving that. So, that’s a quick look back on 2022. For 2023, obviously, we need to do more and there are many things that we will need to do, but I can say that we are confident to continue with our moment in this region and in India.
Rajeev: How do you see your partnership with Round Robin?
John: RoundRobin has been a great part of us. We grew up and got RoundRobin through an earlier acquisition a few years ago. But amazingly we collaborated and we grew business together over the past few years. RoundRobin was also able to expand its business portfolio by tapping into other Progress products and technologies. We like RoundRobin a lot and we like them being very passionate, diligent, and fasting execution. RoundRobin helped to augment Progress Technologies by bringing the services and market reach to the Indian customers and channel community. There is so much potential, we could grow together with them. I am looking forward to more success with the partnership with RoundRobin.
Rajeev: Why should CTOS or CSOs trust Progress, and why they should work with Progress?
John: First of all, Progress has gone portfolio of solutions that span across the application life cycle. The value of Progress is that it’s a proven company. Progress has been around for 40 years and as a listed company, it keeps growing. So, it’s not easy and simple, but if your customer continues with you and you have been able to prove your growth continuously, that’s very important. There are many challenges and new challenges we face when we run IT. We have already helped many other businesses to manage their IT operations and we have accumulated experience by working with many other customers is a good option for CIOs and CTOs in India.
