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As Mobile Software Starts Gaining Enterprise Traction, Progress Software Acquires Telerik

This article is more than 9 years old.

Enterprises are increasingly realizing that mobilizing their workforce isn’t just about giving everyone a smartphone with email access, rather it’s about building a plethora of both internally and externally facing applications – for marketing, operations, collaboration etc.

As the realization about the need for enterprise mobile development tools becomes broader, vendors are positioning to deliver customers an answer. That is the reason for the big price tag for the announced acquisition of Telerik by Progress software today.

The deal, valued at $262.5 million sees Progress, vendors of a general business software platform, scoop up the Telerik portfolio – a .NET toolbox, a mobile development platform and a Content Management System. Progress also gets the not to shabby developer community of some 1.4 million people.

Progress has been around for 30 years and can be thought of an “old school” development tool shop – while profitable, their growth was fairly stagnant and they didn’t really have a compelling mobile solution-set. Last year Progress bough Platform as a Service vendor Rolllbase and recently acquired Modulus, a Node.js vendor. Telerik now gives the company so valuable front end user interface assets that it can leverage. Telerik also brings revenue – last year saw it turnover $60 million and it is reporting 20% growth per annum.

IDC analyst Al Hilwa talked to me via email and reflected that:

Progress has been working hard to build its cloud application development ecosystem with the Rollbase anchored Progress Pacific PaaS, but this acquisition puts it in the middle of a variety of technologies that represent completely new ventures for the company. Telerik has built a strong name for itself in the Software Components space, mostly around the Microsoft ecosystem, but the company has been busy expanding into other areas like mobile development, testing services and the Sitefinity CMS/portal technology that is fairly popular with developers. This acquisition is highly complementary to Progress but also significantly expands its reach and mission and puts it in faster growing areas of the app dev space than its traditional technologies. We will have to see if the combined company can keep executing at the same level in terms of growth as the independent Telerik has been.

An industry insider who wanted to remain anonymous told me that Progress has been using a white-labeled version of a product from Excadel for its mobile play. A public version of that product is called Appery.io and Progress used it as their front-end mobile tool offering calling it OpenEdge. My contact suggested that this product wasn't being adopted successfully in the market, and hence motivated the Telerik purchase.

Progress competes with Oracle WebLogic, IBM WebSphere and TIBCO.  Clearly, their customers want a mobile platform to supplement their capabilities.  Hence the Telerik acquisition.  IBM did the same thing by acquiring WorkLight to add on top of WebSphere, and Oracle did it with their ADF mobile tool on top of WebLogic.

Clearly this acquisition is a positive validation for the other mobile development vendors – the likes of Xamarin, Kony, Kinvey and many others will be please about this deal.

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