The Progress RPMTM suite, which unifies comprehensive visibility, Business Event Processing (BEP) and Business Process Management (BPM) capabilities on a single platform, will be generally available in late April. The market opportunity for this type of solution is expected to be greater than $10 billion [based on IDC Research*] and Progress Software is the only company with the ability to deliver it today.

The Progress RPM suite provides key functionality that enables continuous business improvement in three specific ways:

• First, the 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.,
• Second, the Progress RPM suite includes comprehensive business process modeling and automation capabilities. This enables business users to continuously improve their existing business processes and rapidly implement new ones, without disrupting existing systems.
• Third, the Progress RPM suite continuously monitors millions of events impacting a business in order to identify patterns as well as anticipate opportunities and threats. The RPM suite is capable of immediately responding, either by triggering an automated response, adjusting a business process that is already running or even launching a new business process. It can also simply alert a business user to take action.

According to Maureen Fleming, program director of IDC's business process management and middleware research service: "Over the past two years, one of the fastest-growing areas of software investment by enterprises has been to improve their situational awareness. Logically, the next step is broadening the focus to not only gain visibility into problems or opportunities but to rapidly respond. Enterprises will increasingly look for vendors that offer a knowledgeable and comprehensive appromprehensive approach proach to building this next generation of critical business applications."

All of this functionality is managed through the Progress Control TowerTM product, a unified environment that displays real-time alerts, interactive interfaces and tools. The Control Tower provides business leaders with the ability to view what is happening within their business and to improve it from a single source. This fully configurable, feature-rich, interactive framework delivers a wealth of relevant, key performance indicators (KPIs) and business information. A powerful modeling environment enables new business processes to be rapidly created, modeled, monitored, controlled and improved dynamically.

Richard D. Reidy, president and chief executive officer, Progress Software, said: "We are very excited to be launching the Progress Responsive Process Management suite. Independent research, industry analyst findings, and customer feedback clearly indicate a demand for a solution that helps businesses become more operationally responsive. Equally, operations and line managers have to gain more insight into their business operations and activities than currently exists. They need to increase revenue by becoming more competitive, maximize profits by becoming more efficient, and prevent loss by detecting threats before they cause critical problems. To achieve this, they must be able to anticipate and respond to what will happen, not just react to what has happened. The RPM suite provides every business leader with what they need - total control over their business."

Dr. John Bates, Progress Software's chief technology officer and senior vice president of corporate development and strategy said: "Enterprises are moving away from packaged applications because their features are essentially set in stone. This means that they are unable to quickly adapt to changes in the business environment. The Progress RPM suite enables enterprises to have dynamic business applications that adapt based on changing business circumstances. Using the Progress Control Tower, business and IT users can model and improve responsive processes and create customized dashboards and alerts to understand and manage real-time business conditions."

Examples of industries using dynamic business applications include the financial services industry and specifically high frequency trading, risk surveillance and management, regulatory compliance and fraud prevention; the telecommunications industry with responsive revenue management and location-based services; and, the travel industry with smart airlines and logistics with real-time track-and-trace.

Progress solution accelerators are an integral part of the Progress RPM suite. These solution accelerators are pre-built industry-specific dynamic applications that extend the core Progress RPM suite. They allow business users to define their business processes based on best-in-class industry practices.

Dr. John Bates noted that: "time to market of new services and applications is a key competitive requirement. Progress RPM solution accelerators dramatically reduce time-to-market of key solutions and further enhance an enterprises' ability to improve their business performance."