‘Pacific’ push for startups from Progress

The context of my recent telephonic conversation with Ramesh Loganathan, VP (Products) & Centre Head, Progress Software - Hyderabad Labs, was the announcement by his company to fund startups.

Progress Software is thinking of providing venture capital to startup companies in India and Boston, its global headquarters, and help them develop applications using its recently-launched ‘Pacific’ platform, the company’s president and chief executive officer Philip Pead, had said, as reported by media. “Software developers right here in Hyderabad can actually compete more quickly by using Pacific rather than using traditional control language platforms like Java, .Net and RedHat. We are working towards encouraging such startups. We want to get going on it (venture funding) as soon as possible,” Pead had been quoted to have said. Here is Ramesh, filling in the details.What is ‘Pacific’?

The ‘Pacific platform is an application Platform as a Service (aPaas) for building and managing powerful, data-rich business applications on any cloud, mobile or social platform. Also referred to as productivity paas platforms.

How is it relevant to startups?

As start-ups and independent software vendors (ISVs) actively embrace cloud, and when combined with their compulsions to be lean and responsive, aPaaS platforms help take prototypes quickly to markets to enable fail-fast-and-pivot. The relatively code-free drag-and-drop development enables rapidly building, modifying and maintaining applications. This will be perfect for ISVs and start-ups building domain solutions for specific verticals.

With their focus on domain knowledge and customer use cases, the aPaaS platforms help simplify and abstract the technology underneath. Progress Pacific platform further offers a fundamental new approach that gives businesses and ISVs the freedom to choose the data sources, deployment environments and business logic tools that best fit their needs.

Given the very wide and deep presence of software companies across SI majors, ISVs, start-ups and end domain enterprises, most of whom are building business solutions and applications, the Progress Pacific platform is extremely relevant. And as the productivity PaaS platform space gets into mainstream, we believe many of these ISVs and start-ups will adopt Progress pacific.