Progress Software Corporation, a Nasdaq-listed provider of infrastructure software products, is in the process of expanding its India research and development (R&D) centre at Hyderabad to accelerate development of newer versions of its new Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite.
The company has a global R&D strength of 700, of which 180 professional are based out of its 40,000-sft Hyderabad centre. It is now acquiring more space and hopes to go in for recruitment to fill this up by December. Once through, the Hyderabad centre will house 60 per cent of the company's global R&D staff, Rob Levy, executive vice-president and chief product officer of Progress Software, told Business Standard.
“RPM for us is a big opportunity and the market for this type of solution, according to IDC Research, is expected to be greater than $10 billion. Even capturing a part of it will be good. In order to do this, we need to grow,” he added.
Progress RPM suite is a human-centric platform providing business users with real-time visibility into business processes and systems, including legacy processes both inside and outside the business. The RPM suite is the first product developed by the company while the three existing products — Apama, Actionall and Savvion (with development centres in Mumbai and Coimbatore) — had been acquired.
Progress had released Version-I of the RPM suite at the end of April 2010, and is currently looking at expanding its partner eco-system for marketing the same. “Right now, dialogues are on with all the top-4 IT companies in the country for RPM. What we expect from them is to bring to the table their expertise and reach as collaborative go-to-market partners,” Levy said.
Each of these IT companies need to establish centres of excellence (CoEs), get to know the product and find projects to work on, he said, while refusing to draw any time line for the deals to crystallise.
Stating that the over $500-million company was growing at a double digit rate on RPM since this April, Levy said they were looking for extension of the RPM suite next year, either through acquisitions or building new versions in-house.
“As the chief product officer, I always look for acquisitions. We will start talking about RPM’s Version-II beginning next year when we will think about what technology we need to acquire,” Levy said, adding India was a market with a lot of technologies and many opportunities for acquisitions.
