CRN Interview: Joe Alsop, Progress Software

Progress Software is among the fastest-growing software vendors in the industry today, due largely to its efforts to help solution providers build vertically focused applications. In an interview with Editor in Chief Michael Vizard, Progress CEO Joe Alsop outlines Progress' approach to partners and changes in data management trends.

CRN: How would you characterize Progress Software's approach to partners today?

Alsop: I'd say the main changes have been an increased emphasis on working with the partners and making them successful. We spend a lot of time on what we call business empowerment. We have 2,000 partners. I'll say two-thirds of our revenue derives from [the channel].

CRN: How profitable are your partners?

Alsop: I know some of them are obscenely profitable, but then others are probably struggling. We do know that the ones that have participated in our empowerment programs grew more than 20 percent last year.

CRN: How is Progress organized?

Alsop: We now have five business units or subsidiaries. The Progress Company, which is still 80 percent-plus of our business, includes the Progress databases as part of the Open Edge platform and 2,000 partners delivering 5,000 applications. Sonic Software is the application integration company. Then we had the recent acquisition of Data Direct, the leader in ODBC [Open Database Connectivity] and JDBC [Java Database Connectivity] drivers. Object Store, which is an object database, was part of the acquisition of Excelon. And Peer Direct focuses on database application replication, so that instead of having one monolithic database you get the job done with a distributed network of databases.

CRN: How is Progress as a whole doing?

Alsop: In the last four quarters we're the only significant medium to large software company that's shown double-digit growth in both revenue and earnings.

CRN: What's driving that growth?

Alsop: The fact that we deliver an embedded database with the application that doesn't require a DBA makes it a lot easier for our partners to sell. The database goes in with the application, doesn't require a separate installation, doesn't require a DBA [and] rarely, if ever, goes down.

CRN: Progress has changed some of its pricing strategies to help partners enable an ASP approach to customers. How does this work?

Alsop: Instead of charging up front for the product per processor per user, we work out an arrangement with our application partners interested in delivering their application as a service. Then application partners have complete freedom to price the offering to their customer any way they wish. That business is still a small fraction of our overall $300 million-plus in revenue, but is growing very rapidly. We have chosen to use [the] ASP [model] as our testing ground for innovative new pricing.

CRN: As the nature of data management changes in the wake of technologies such as Web services, how important is it to be able to manage data outside of the database?

Alsop: As soon as you get into remote offices, people basically want to treat the application like an appliance. You turn it on in the morning like your copier machine and you don't ever have to think about IT [operations] issues. That's where our technology traditionally plays the strongest. If you're talking about deployed embedded apps, that's where we play.