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August 22, 2001

The Progress Company, a business unit of Bedford, Mass.-based Progress Software (NASDAQ:PRGS), today announced that it is continuing in its efforts to make the road from packaged applications to software-as-a-service a smooth one.

In a keynote presentation at the xSP World & Channel Conference in Boston, company president Dave Ireland said Progress' ASPen Program is expanding to include managed services as well as additional educational and empowerment services.

The ASPen Program is designed to enable independent software vendors (ISVs) to rapidly develop, deploy and deliver their software as a Web service through the ASP model. Progress recently added to its ASPen program through the June 4 acquisition of Santa Calif-based application infrastructure provider Allegrix (see Progress Marches On).

"It's all about simplicity — getting ISVs to the ASP model so they can start selling software-as-a-service," Mike Foster, vice president of marketing, Allegrix/ASPen Managed Services, Progress Software, told ASPnews. With the expansion to managed hosting services, "we offer an end-to-end solution."

"We add knobs for ISVs," Foster said of the new services, "which makes it easy for them to add users, determine levels of security, and add products." Giving control to its partners through easy-to-use tools is the key, according to Foster. "We want the ISV facing the customer."

The new managed hosting services will offer 24x7x365 service specifically tailored for applications based on Progress software and technologies. "We give them a menu of services to choose from. We've productized managed hosting for ISVs. They can pick the level of service and the level of security they want," Foster told ASPnews.

In addition to expanded managed services, other elements of today's announcement include the following:

• Empowerment Services — enhances AppsAlive demonstration center and presentation center, offering the same 24x7x365 services as a production application environment. AppsAlive lets potential customers, in effect, test drive an application from Progress partner ASPs.
• Professional Services — provides business and technical professional services to help companies move to an ASP business model and Web-enable their applications
• Educational Services — will soon offer ASP-in-a-Box business assessment information and tools as an online service
• Marketing Services — offers support from the ASPen marketing team to assist with go-to-market programs and communications activities.

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