Internal incubator program supports breakthrough ideas focused on
blockchain, augmented and virtual reality, and microapps
BEDFORD, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 22, 2018--
Progress
(NASDAQ: PRGS), the leading provider of application development and
deployment technologies, today announced three new projects under
development in Progress Labs, the internal technology incubator in which
teams create, test, and turn innovative ideas into reality. First
launched in 2017, Progress Labs is designed to identify and nurture the
best ideas from Progress employees and bring them to market as new
technologies designed to enable Progress customers to innovate in their
own businesses.
“Technology is moving faster than ever before, and organizations need to
innovate to survive,” said Dmitri Tcherevik, Chief Technology Officer,
Progress. “Amid a wave of hype around emerging technologies, we’ve
chosen to explore three specific areas -- blockchain, AR/VR and
microapps – that will have a high impact on the way businesses operate
in the next three to five years. Within Progress Labs, we are dedicated
to evaluating and delivering on these technologies, bringing real
solutions to market that will benefit our customers.”
Blockchain Technology
Blockchain and distributed ledger
technology are revolutionizing how organizations exchange information by
allowing data to remain trustworthy while being securely distributed.
According to Gartner, “By 2025, the business value added by blockchain
will grow to slightly over $176 billion, then surge to more than $3.1
trillion by 2030.”1
Progress Labs teams are creating new tools to help organizations easily
build and deliver the next generation of blockchain-based apps. The
Progress blockchain platform will make it very easy to set up a
blockchain network that brings together disparate processes and
information systems into a secure, permissioned and distributed ledger
that all network participants rely on. Developers will quickly deliver
new solutions that address even the most challenging of collaboration
scenarios with trust built into the network by design.
Augmented and Virtual Reality
In its Tech Vision 2018
survey, Accenture notes that “immersive experiences delivered through VR
and AR will take us much further in the digital future, eliminating
distance altogether and extending our definition of reality.”
Through augmented and virtual reality advancements, Progress Labs
intends to create solutions that connect employees to vital information,
sensor data and physical equipment in a natural way that blends the
physical and virtual worlds. The goal is to deliver augmented
experiences that adapt to the environment and job at hand to increase
worker productivity across head-mounted displays (smart glass) and
desktops. This can promote better training, optimized employee workflow
and democratized access to expert knowledge for the entire workforce.
Microapps
While most organizations realize that mobility
drives employee productivity and customer engagement, IT executives
still struggle to leverage innovations such as microservices and
cloud-native architectures for integrating business systems, automating
workflows and delivering engaging user experiences. The need for
maintenance, security and compliance further inhibits new IT
initiatives. Micromoments, or microapps, are a new paradigm in
application architecture and user experience that delivers on the
promise of mobility with new levels of flexibility to increase user
productivity and optimize operations, without comprising security or
increasing costs.
The microapps platform in development at Progress Labs will provide a
set of development and administration tools that make it easy to improve
employee productivity. This is achieved by delivering business workflows
through a set of microservices and microapps that are readily available
to users, without the need to install, authenticate and struggle with
multiple mobile apps and web portals.
Every year a new cohort of extraordinary teams join Progress Labs while
others graduate the program. Teams generally spend one to a maximum of
two years testing their ideas by implementing a sequence of experiments
carefully designed to prove their economic and customer value.
Successful projects become part of the Progress portfolio upon their
graduation from the Labs. The Progress Labs pilot program in 2017
resulted in the release of Progress® NativeChat™, the artificial
intelligence-driven platform for creating and deploying chatbots.
For more information about Progress Labs and to track the progress of
the current cohort, please click here.
Additional Resources
About Progress
Progress
(NASDAQ: PRGS) offers the leading platform for developing and deploying
strategic business applications. We enable customers and partners to
deliver modern, high-impact digital experiences with a fraction of the
effort, time and cost. Progress offers powerful tools for easily
building adaptive user experiences across any type of device or
touchpoint, award-winning machine learning that enables cognitive
capabilities to be a part of any application, the flexibility of a
serverless cloud to deploy modern apps, business rules, web content
management, plus leading data connectivity technology. Over 1,700
independent software vendors, 100,000 enterprise customers, and two
million developers rely on Progress to power their applications. Learn
about Progress at www.progress.com or
+1-800-477-6473.
Progress and NativeChat are trademarks or registered trademarks of
Progress Software Corporation and/or one of its subsidiaries or
affiliates in the US and other countries. Any other trademarks contained
herein are the property of their respective owners.
1Gartner, “Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2018:
Blockchain,” 08 March 2018, Brian Burke, David Furlonger, David W.
Cearley, Rajesh Kandaswamy, Fabio Chesini
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180522005051/en/
Source: Progress
Progress
Kim Baker, +1 888-365-2779
pr@progress.com
