Progress Data Platform
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Progress is a publicly quoted software company trading in Nasdaq, founded in 1981 and headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts. In 2023 it had revenues of $700 million with 15% growth. It operates in 20+ countries and has a quite high R&D expenditure of 19%, with a four million strong developer community. Progress has a range of AI-powered digital experiences and infrastructure software products. Its data management products have multi-model management and strong semantic capabilities and are typically used in industries with a complex mix of structured and unstructured data. These verticals include pharmaceuticals, publishing and news, manufacturing and financial services. Customers include Airbus, Volkswagen, The Washington Post and Amgen.
Enterprises have to deal with very complex data landscape. One Progress customer shared a chart showing 4,700 separate data sources, while one US healthcare customer has 5 petabytes of patient data to deal with. Presenting data of this complexity to users is a challenge, and the semantic understanding of the Progress technology helps, for example being able to package up “data products” to show users meaningful business entities such as “customer”, “invoice” or “campaign” while hiding the complex data landscape that actually lies behind such concepts. In reality, a customer record might be ingested from several systems and these records matched, merged and enriched, but that is a technical process that the typical business user does not need to see. Such data products can be managed in either a centralized or decentralized way, with data governance either centrally driven or distributed across the business lines in data fabric or data mesh architectures respectively.
The widespread use of generative AI raises new issues, as proprietary corporate data like company policy manuals and technical documentation are used to supplement commercial large language models, in a process known as retrieval augmented generation (RAG). Progress has support for vector search, a key feature necessary for RAG, as well as additional features to help support the implementation of this approach.
In 2024 Progress decided to combine several of its previously separate data-related products into a single offering, the Progress Data Platform. This combines MarkLogic, the multi-model data management tool, with Semaphore, which manages semantic models and applies them to data, along with Corticon, a BRMS for policy-driven decision-making, and DataDirect for connectivity and integration. This combined offering is a sensible move, as customers are increasingly taking a holistic approach to data management, from connecting to sources and integrating multiple records, through to data quality, to managing structured and unstructured data, to dealing with data pipelines and data lineage as well as managing this overall through data governance. It is likely that in 2025 we will see a visual assembly tool to further assist in the deployment of these technologies. Progress is a large and successful company with a proven track record in some demanding data management projects, so this kind of capability should add value to its customers and enable it to compete better with alternative integrated platforms such as Databricks, MongoDB, Talend, and others.