Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS) stock rose over 16.6% on Jan 11th, 2018 (as of 10:38AM EST; Source: Google finance) post their solid fourth quarter of 2017 update as well as their efforts to expand their market opportunity.
Progress Software Corporation fourth quarter of 2017 revenue reached $168.3 million, which was $1.3 million above their high end guidance range of $115 million. Some six-figure deals drove the performance despite an unfavorable FX impact of over $700,000 from a stronger U.S. dollar. As a result, the earnings per share of $0.67 was also well above the high end of the guidance range of $0.61. Their SaaS-related revenue for OpenEdge was $5.6 million for the quarter, which is a rise of 12% as compared to the fourth quarter of last year. For the full year, this revenue rose 15% yoy to $21.8 million, against 2016.
The group is expanding their target market opportunity with their first go-to-market initiative for 2018 being cognitive anomaly detection and prediction, or CADP. The market for these cognitive apps was $1.4 billion in 2016, building at 30% annually. McKinsey expects predictive maintenance to help companies save $630 billion by 2025.
Two of the group’s major partners have already expressed their support for this new technology path. QAD, is the group’s largest partner, who has expanded their relationship with the group and acknowledged that the group’s cognitive application strategy is well aligned with their vision for the future and they see that RPM is a major opportunity to drive new value for their end customers.
Other focus area in 2018 is mobility with the mobile application developed in the market is over $1.5 billion today, rising at 28% annually. Gartner expects more than 75% of enterprises to be adopted at least one mobile application development platform by 2020 as compared to only 33% in 2015. The group’s mobile application development platform features NativeScript, which enables businesses to write truly native apps across devices; Kinvey, the best-in-class, cloud, native serverless platform to deploy backend logic.