In an effort to shore up both the front-end and back-end of its application development platforms, Progress Software will acquire Telerik for $262.5 million.
As part of an effort to shore up both the front-end and back-end of its application development platforms, Progress Software will acquire Telerik for $262.5 million.
While Telerik is best known for user interface components, the company earlier this year launched a mobile application development platform (MADP). Matt Robinson, vice president of technology for Progress Software, says the Node.js application developed on that platform will be able to run on the Modulus platform-as-a-service environment (PaaS) in the cloud, which in turn will give those applications access to back-end applications and services using the DataDirect data integration software that Progress offers.
Robinson says the user interface frameworks that Telerik created for both JavaScript and Microsoft .NET applications will make the application running on the Progress PaaS environment.
Progress Software on its own accounts for applications that are accessed by more than 4 million users and 47,000 businesses in over 175 countries. Progress is making a concerted effort to modernize many of those applications by helping customers reengineer them to run in PaaS environments that can either be deployed on premises or managed by Progress. The addition of Telerik will accelerate that process at a time when many organizations are also trying to build applications that are optimized for multiple mobile computing environments.
Telerik, meanwhile, has been reinventing itself around JavaScript and the development of mobile applications using its Kendo framework. In the last 12 months, Telerik generated more than $60 million in revenue.
It’s not just clear yet whether the acquisition of Telerik signals the beginning of a consolidation in the mobile application development space. There is obviously no shortage of MADPs, many of which need to connect to robust back-end services in order to be viable.
The acquisition of Telerik comes on the heels of the acquisition of Modulus, which gave Progress Software access to a Node.js framework that runs on a NoSQL MongoDB database in the cloud, alongside its Pacific PaaS platform that runs both on premises and in the cloud. Prior to that, Progress Software acquired Rollbase, a provider of a PaaS environment delivered via the cloud.
Putting Telerik together with all these other technologies will take a little time. But Robinson notes that with Telerik making major investments in JavaScript in general and Node.js in particular, the integration of all these technologies is getting substantially easier.
As such, it may not necessarily come as a surprise to see more mergers and acquisitions across an MADP category that is increasingly standardizing on one form of JavaScript or another.