Progress Software Snaps Up Savvion for £30 Million

Progress Software has described Savvion’s BPM (business process management) suite as a ‘perfect fit’, after it acquired the company in a deal worth $49 million (£30 million).

Progress announced the acquisition at its Global Field Operations Conference in Orlando, Florida.

Savvion has more than 300 customers for its standards-based BPM suite. The company said in a news release, “The combination of Progress Software’s Business Event Processing (BEP), Business Transaction Assurance (BTA) and Integration portfolio coupled with the Savvion BPM suite better enables enterprises to achieve the highest levels of operational responsiveness” by helping them to “integrate disparate systems and processes.”

Richard Reidy, president and CEO of Progress Software, said in a statement, “We believe that achieving operational responsiveness has become a business imperative … Our acquisition of Savvion enhances our goal of providing] unprecedented business visibility, responsiveness and business process improvement, coupled with the highest degree of data integrity and integration.”

“The Savvion BPM suite is a perfect fit for Progress because it offers leading capabilities for business process modelling and execution,” said John Bates, Progress Software’s CTO and head of corporate development. “The suite also uniquely includes other integrated key capabilities, including business rules management, document management, an event engine and an analytics engine.”

Providing an analytical view on the matter, Maureen Fleming, program director of IDC’s business process management and middleware research service, was quoted in the same news release as saying, “As enterprises increase their focus on operational responsiveness – and most of them are – there is a need to build event-driven systems that adapt continuously to current and trending business conditions. We call these ‘business navigation systems,’ which converge visibility, event processing and BPM software. Vendors offering all three capabilities as a system are in a much stronger position [from which] to partner with their customers to build these new types of high-value applications.”

A Savvion customer also weighed in. Sandeep Phanasgaonkar, president and CTO of Reliance Capital, said in a statement, “The Savvion BPM suite has quick deployment time. Reliance reduced turnaround time and increased adherence to SLAs [service-level agreements] after implementing the Savvion BPM solution. Savvion helped create an 86 percent reduction in policy generation time. Our ROI was realised in less than six months.”