Highlights:

  • MarkLogic leads the list of local XML DBMSs and RDF stores published by DB-Engines.
  • Technology of MarkLogic proves to be the best fit for Progress’ prevalent operations.

Progress Software Inc. announced the successful acquisition of MarkLogic Inc., a NoSQL Database Management System (DBMS) developer. The system generally serves enterprise data integration. The purchase price, though earlier kept confidential, was later revealed as USD 355M, according to the press reports.

The deal is crucial for deriving values from complex data with the aid of unified enterprise-grade semantic data platform, said Progress. MarkLogic has been a local DBMS for extensible markup language usage, a search engine, a Resource Description Framework store, and a document store.

Despite being a lesser-known NoSQL system, MarkLogic still secured first position in DB-Engines’ list of native RDF stores and XML DBMSs, and fifth in the category of search engines.

Yogesh Gupta, chief executive at Progress Software, stated that MarkLogic was established in 2001 and has generated an annual revenue of more than USD 100 billion. In 2020, Vector Capital Management LP, a private equity firm, acquired the company.

MarkLogic’s technology including DataDirect integration engine and OpenEdge relational offering has been a suitable choice for existing data management lines of Progress. “The database is a great product, and the additional value of metadata modeling is a competitive differentiator,” Gupta added.

Unifying Varying Data

A semantic engine synchronizes data over multiple sources that negates the use of same terminology and syntax. Gupta said, “The same set of information can have different names and terminologies so the meaning quite often isn’t clear. A semantic database is about finding data that are related without having a hard match. It can build relationships across information sources.”

This poses irking situations for large companies who have “thousands of suppliers and hundreds of thousands of parts with different terminology,” Gupta commented. He added, “If you have a database that can ingest from both structured and unstructured sources and apply semantic data modeling you can rationalize it and apply analytics.”

Progress Software, operational since 1981, generated a revenue worth USD 531 million in FY 2021 and sequentially maintained a low profile. Approximately 40% of the company’s revenue is extracted from OpenEdge, released 40 years back.

“Its claim to fame is that it’s the lowest total cost of ownership database so it gets embedded in a lot of applications,” highlighted Gupta, revealing that over 1,700 software companies ship OpenEdge based on original equipment manufacturing. “As customers want to expand into unstructured data they want metadata management and NoSQL capabilities,” he concluded by claiming MarkLogic to be the most feasible option.

Originating from application development, Progress is seeking to penetrate into agile methodologies such as DevOps. Almost two years back, the company acquired Chef Software Inc., an infrastructure automation developer, following the acquisition of DevOps-focused Kemp Technologies, Inc. in 2021.