While interest in the SaaS market is hardly a new phenomenon, we have been used to seeing the application suite as the visible product offering – after all, it is the application functionality that the ultimate consumer is buying. The infrastructure that the suite provider chooses to host its applications should be invisible to consumers of the service, so the infrastructure becomes a commodity – provided that it provides adequate availability and scalability, and it offers no differentiation to service consumers.
It follows that providers of infrastructure software are only able to influence the market via the application provider – in fact, the application provider becomes the new ‘middleman’ for infrastructure vendors.
Progress has for many years built a successful business model around providing a productive development and runtime environment for third-party application developers. In order to build a sustainable market, Progress has had to learn how to manage a relatively large number of application partners, and it is evident that it has succeeded in creating a viable and loyal partner base. Mainly, these application development partners have addressed niche markets, often targeted at mid-sized organizations, and these are precisely the types of organization that have most to gain from buying their applications as SaaS services.
Progress has created an environment to assist its application partners by announcing a formal relationship with OpSource to host Progress infrastructure products, including its OpenEdge application platform, the Sonic Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), and the Actional service-oriented architecture (SOA) and web services management products.
Revealed in a separate announcement, Progress has partnered with Lombardi for both companies to jointly market Lombardi’s Teamworks business process management product, executing on the Sonic ESB. Additionally, the Apama complex event processing engine has been enabled for delivery through SaaS, and a further announcement has been made that Dow Jones has integrated its Elementized News Feed into Apama to support real-time buy/sell decision-making based on complex combinations of real-time events.
Taken in combination, these announcements suggest that Progress has set about creating an environment to make its infrastructure products as attractive as possible to application providers aiming to deliver SaaS solutions, and at the same time encouraging existing partners to explore SaaS as a delivery mechanism, and new route to market.
While SOA has been slow to take off in the mid-market sector (particularly in Europe), SaaS does represent a low-risk introduction of SOA that is in line with the outsourcing policies of many mid-sized organizations. By providing the entire infrastructure package, Progress will enable organizations that are users of Progress-based applications to start to orchestrate the delivered services into meaningful processes, and to introduce real-time response to complex event scenarios into their evolving business practices.
This also appears to be a timely move on the part of Progress to build a strong mid-market base of SaaS capabilities while the market is still at an early point in the growth curve. By cementing relationships with application providers at this stage, it has the ability to outmaneuver its competitors and create a strong growth potential.
Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)
