This is my first time at a Progress Software analyst day; I’ve been at Savvion events in the past, and their acquisition by Progress is likely why I was invited here. The day started with Rick Reidy discussing the new strategy and structure that Progress is pursuing: they’ve tended to be organized into product silos, and are breaking down those internal silos to offer a more integrated experience not just at the technology layer, but with their sales and support teams. The Savvion acquisition is a key part of their product strategy, since it provides business-driven process improvement capabilities as part of their “sense and respond” initiative that aren’t as easy to do with other products. Using Savvion’s process modeler to drive processes at all levels, they’ll be able to bring together process and data capabilities across event processing, ESB and BPM.
He teased us with an announcement of a new product, Control Tower, which will allow processes to be viewed and changed dynamically by business users. He also pre-announced two suites: Responsive Process Management Suite addressing the process side of achieving operational responsiveness, and Enterprise Data Services addressing the data side. Since others have already tweeted about this, I don’t think that it’s much of a secret any more. We’ll be hearing more about the new products throughout the day, as well as how they’re changing their internal structure to better provide these to their customers.