In an announcement about the Progress Asia Forum 2008 – road show, held by application infrastructure software provider for development, deployment, integration and management of business applications, Progress Software Corporation (PSC), told Biztech2.0 that it expects its APAC market to register a 15% growth from the current 7%-8%. It said that India and China being were its highest growth drivers. Currently constituting less than 1% of the total APAC market, PSC sees huge growth opportunities in India targeting business applications vendors for verticals including, manufacturing, telecom and BFSI.

Said Nicholas Tang, Managing Director, Asia, Progress Software, "Enterprises in India are yet to see full utilisation of packaged applications. Slowly, larger corporations are waking up to the need and are looking for standardised packaged applications. That’s where our opportunities are." Tang also informed that while in terms of number of accounts manufacturing will be their highest growth drivers, in terms of deal value it is telecom and BFSI that bring business. "Especially in case of telecom, business applications vendors are asked to develop solutions that can make their infrastructure agile and do seamless backend integration to their value added services. Our end to end solution can cater to both these needs," added Tang.

Concluded Tang, "Progress Asia Forum - India 2008 represents the start of our push into India from both a domestic as well as export market perspective. We plan to have this event every year in addition to other sales and marketing activities around the country, which will complement the significant work that is already being done at our development and competency centre in Hyderabad, the largest centre for us outside USA."