Event
On 18 October 2012, Progress Software announced that it will sell four of its businesses to privately held Trilogy Enterprises. Trilogy says it will combine these businesses — Sonic, Savvion, Actional and DXSI — into a separate company, Aurea Software, which Trilogy says will:
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Be led by Trilogy President Scott Brighton
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Have approximately 250 employees, and 1,500 customers, and by Trilogy's estimate, $100 million in annual revenue
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Focus on providing “best of breed” intelligent business process, application and data management solutions, and creating a next-generation intelligent business process management suite (iBPMS)
Progress expects to complete the sale in November 2012.
Analysis
Trilogy provides applications, software platforms and R&D outsourcing to large enterprises worldwide, and has acquired numerous software companies, including:
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Versata, which provides applications, business rules management systems (BRMSs) and professional services
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Artemis Software, a project portfolio management vendor
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Nextance, a contract management and spend management application vendor
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PurchasingNet, a purchase-to-pay application
The Sonic, Savvion, Actional, and DXSI product lines were among the 10 product lines that Progress said in April 2012 that it planned to divest (see
"Plans to Focus on aPaaS Market Signal Challenges Ahead for Progress"
). These four former Progress businesses provide Aurea with the majority of capabilities required for it to create an iBPMS. DevFactory, the R&D outsourcing arm of Trilogy, has several thousand offshore developers who could expedite the launch of a new Aurea platform.
Vertical industry solutions are the primary way Trilogy goes to market. Trilogy has used acquired products to develop solutions for the automotive, financial services and insurance, high technology, and telecommunications industries. Many of these solutions already feature predictive analytics and could provide a channel for future iBPMS sales, as well as a vehicle through which Aurea could sell process templates.
Trilogy’s history with previous acquisitions, such as Artemis, suggest the approach it may take with the Progress product lines. (Artemis, a visionary in the
"Magic Quadrant for IT Project and Portfolio Management Applications, 2006"
, failed to meet the inclusion criteria for the
"MarketScope for Project and Portfolio Management Software Applications"
in 2012.) Trilogy has invested in Artemis and other acquired products, thereby enabling existing customers to continue to gain value from those products. However, the company has not grown its market share for any products apart from its industry solutions. As a result, Gartner believes that Trilogy will use the Aurea iBPMS to integrate solutions within the Trilogy ecosystem, rather than actively marketing it as a general-purpose platform for process improvement. Consequently, overfocus on industry solutions may result in Aurea underserving existing Sonic, Actional and DXSI customers that are not candidates for Trilogy's industry solutions, and that are looking for best-in-breed middleware tools.
