Progress Software is encouraging the developers of business applications to adopt a 'cognitive first' strategy.
Australia and New Zealand is Progress Software's biggest market in the Asia Pacific region, and that was behind the company's decision to locate its APJ headquarters in Melbourne, vice president and managing director of international operations for APJ and EMEA Mark Armstrong told iTWire.
Eight people have already been hired, and another four to six appointments are planned. "We're investing [in Australia]," he said. Progress has taken on many new partners - "it's a big market for us."
Progress is trying to help its partners - notably ISVs - realise that the mantra should not longer be "mobile first" but rather "cognitive first." That is, applications should take advantage of technologies such as machine learning in order to allow the automation of complex situations such as predicting equipment failure.
{loadposition stephen08}McKinsey has estimated that predictive maintenance alone could yield worldwide savings of US$630 billion over five or six years, he said. "The potential savings are huge."
Industries such as manufacturing and logistics will increasingly expect to see AI capabilities in the software they use, Armstrong suggested.
Three of Progress's Australian partners have been recognised internationally for their moves into the cognitive arena. For example, Revolution Software Services is already applying Progress's technology to its automotive dealer software, using face recognition to create heat maps of people's movements around the showroom. It also plans to build in predictive analytics, for instance to indicate when someone in the showroom is most likely to buy.
Companies in Australia and in APJ more generally are typically smaller than those in North America, and Progress realises it is unlikely many of them will be able to take advantage of advances in data science of their own accord.
So its strategy is to provide a platform that will allow ISVs to build cognitive software for SMEs, without needed lots of data scientists.
"Our goal... is to make data science available to the SME market through ISVs," Armstrong told iTWire.
The development of that platform is in its early days, he admitted, but the recent acquisitions of Kinvey and DataRPM are steps towards it. These acquisitions give Progress a "big opportunity in Australia," he said.