Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS) announced today that it named five partners as global award recipients for the cultivation of progressive and unparalleled business applications. The Progress Partner Awards recognize partners across five categories using one or more of Progress’ core solutions for application development and deployment, including Progress® OpenEdge®, Progress Apama®, Progress Corticon® and Progress DataDirect®.

Officially announced at the Progress Software Global Partner Conference last week in Las Vegas, Nevada, the 11th annual Channel Partner Awards recognized 15 partners, all of which were nominated for enriching the Progress partner community and serving their customer base with leading software solutions.

Progress Software Global Partner award winners include:

• Supercorp Technology - Partner of the Year Award. The Partner of the Year exemplifies the true meaning of partnership, demonstrating the highest levels of technology innovation, driving growth and evangelism within its customers’ industry, as well as enthusiastic participation within the Progress community. In 2012, Supercorp transformed its strategy to differentiate against competition, using a SaaS offering to grow its license revenue by 23% year-over-year. A service-oriented partner with strong customer focus, Supercorp is an evangelist in the supperannuation industry in Australia.
• Skyward - SaaS Excellence Award. The SaaS Excellence Award honors an ISV whose participation in Progress’ SaaS enablement programs resulted in highly innovative offerings that achieved impressive commercial success within their market. Skyward is an Elite Partner serving the education marketplace. Over the past few years, Skyward moved to a SaaS-based strategy. Currently, approximately 75% of Skyward’s new business is SaaS-based, setting the company apart from competitors and enabling it to compete in both small and large districts.
• Bravepoint - Partner Collaboration Award. This award recognizes the partner that participated in the most successfully brokered deals and illustrated the benefit of partner collaboration and cooperation within the Progress partner community. In collaboration with Progress, Bravepoint helps facilitate technology enablement in the partner community by delivering a completely new course curriculum for developing multi-tenant applications in the Cloud that enables ISVs to transform applications and leverage all the benefits of multi-tenancy in less than five days.
• QAD - Business Focus Award. The Business Focus award distinguishes companies that demonstrate foresight and an understanding of current and future market opportunities. A market leader in automotive parts manufacturing, QAD provides a solution that competitors are unable to match and their Global customers require. QAD defines Effective Enterprise as one where every business process is working at peak efficiency and perfectly aligned to the company’s strategic goals. The pursuit of this vision drives the products that it develops and the approach it takes when engaging with customers. QAD received the 2012 Partner of the Year Award.
• VanMeijel Automatisering BV – Challenger Award. The Challenger Award identifies the partner that pushes the boundaries of the product by driving out-of-the-box product innovation and enhancements. VanMeijel Automatisering BV, a Netherlands-based provider of software and services for project financial management in the construction space, personifies the Challenger traits. Not only has it driven OpenEdge BPM revenue through business processes, as part of the METACOM application, it has also adopted and embraced application delivery in the cloud using the Progress Arcade development platform.

Progress Software has worked with thousands of channel partners in over 140 countries to develop a successful Partner Program called Partner+. Progress provides a consultative relationship that offers partners around the world a wealth of resources to meet their customers’ needs, grow and sustain a profitable business, and achieve long-term business goals. Through its award-winning empowerment programs, Progress Partners have access to experts who help them solve business and technical challenges in their markets. Progress works with its Partners throughout the business opportunity cycle; from concept to deployment and optimization, to drive business growth.

Supporting Quotes:

Kurt Groeneveld, CEO at Supercorp Technology Pty Ltd, said: “Supercorp is honored to be awarded 2013 Partner of the Year. This award is yet another highlight in a 25-year relationship with Progress that has seen many highlights. Progress Software continues to build the best tools on the market for cloud development and this allows us to get on with the job of building powerful and innovative on-premise and cloud-based applications.”

Kimberly King, VP Global Partners & Channels at Progress Software, said: “We pride ourselves on our strong and vibrant partner community and thrive on supporting each of our more than 1,500 partners as they develop and deploy next generation applications using Progress OpenEdge, Apama, Corticon and DataDirect products. Whether cloud, mobile or on-premise, our solutions provide the foundation that enables our partners to drive business growth. We commend this year’s Channel Partner Award winners on their forward-thinking initiatives.”

About Progress Software Corporation

Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS) simplifies the development, deployment and management of business applications on-premise or on any Cloud, on any platform and on any device with minimal IT complexity and low total cost of ownership. Progress Software can be reached at www.progress.com or 1-781-280-4000.

Follow Progress Software on Twitter: @ProgressSW

Progress, Apama, Corticon, DataDirect, and OpenEdge are trademarks or registered trademarks of Progress Software Corporation or one of its subsidiaries or affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. Any other names contained herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.