Ed Keisling, in his role as the Chief AI Officer at Progress Software, features in an interview series.
Progress Software, a leading provider of infrastructure and application development tools, is actively advancing its AI strategy across its product portfolio. The company is integrating AI into various business functions to enhance efficiency, improve customer satisfaction, and free up resources for high-value work.
One of the key advancements in Progress's AI deployments is real-time event monitoring and action capabilities. This allows the company to provide dynamic insights for users in a natural language format, helping businesses accelerate work and surface actionable items for the operations team. Keisling, Chief AI Officer at Progress Software, emphasizes that high-quality data is crucial for successful AI implementation.
Progress Software's AI efforts focus on infrastructure monitoring, content automation, semantic search, and responsible generative AI. The company aims to embed AI across its products, including Sitefinity, Flowmon, and Semaphore, to help businesses accelerate development, streamline operations, and improve decision-making.
Recent advancements in AI have made scalable implementation more feasible due to improved technology and increased accessibility. Progress is ensuring its AI strategy scales responsibly across a large and diverse ecosystem by standardizing AI learnings and making them available to other products.
The acquisition of Nuclia is a significant step, as it brings additional AI capabilities to enhance product offerings and customer retention. Integrating Nuclia's technology is seen as crucial for capturing a larger share of the AI software market, especially in blending internal data with generative AI.
Progress has achieved operational efficiency through AI adoption, which supports the company's non-GAAP operating margins near 40%. The integration of AI solutions helps in creating a flywheel effect, where more customers lead to more data, and thus more opportunities to upsell AI solutions.
Progress Software's strategy is seen as a masterclass in balancing growth and profitability, with a focus on recurring revenue and AI innovation. The company has raised its full-year 2025 guidance, reflecting confidence in its AI-driven growth strategy.
Progress prioritizes business value over AI buzzwords, focusing on measurable outcomes that directly impact customers' bottom line. The company has robust pipelines and coding standards, and a human in the loop to review all changes in AI development.
Progress also recognizes the importance of AI becoming a core competency of all employees for organizations to thrive, not just leaders. Keisling is passionate about enabling the Progress team to use AI to make their work easier and drive greater value for customers. To this end, Progress emphasizes creating "safe AI learning spaces" to allow experimentation without fear.
In addition, Progress has regular AI hackathons to come up with new product ideas and ways to automate or streamline products. Mentorship programs at MIT and the University of New Hampshire instill the concept of "learning how to learn" in students, to help them navigate shifts in technology.
Progress's ongoing initiative to tie the monitoring capabilities of Loadmaster, Flowmon, and WhatsUp Gold products together aims to drive holistic insights. The Progress Flowmon platform acts as an always-on cybersecurity analyst, distilling important events and findings for security teams.
In conclusion, Progress Software is leveraging AI to drive innovation, efficiency, and strategic growth across its product portfolio, positioning itself for long-term success in the rapidly evolving AI software market.
- To bolster its AI-driven growth strategy, Progress Software is integrating Nuclia's technology, aiming to enhance product offerings and retain customers, especially by blending internal data with generative AI.
- Progress Software is not only focusing on AI implementation in high-level business functions, but also encouraging its employees to use AI as a core competency to drive value for customers and facilitate innovation throughout the organization.
