6 ms·

Progress Software to Acquire Telerik for $263M

73 points by johandt 12y ago

bless1 12y ago
Telerik makes awful
- digibo 12y ago
  Did you just create an account to say a half of a negative sentence? o_O
uptown 12y ago
For non-subscribers: https://www.google.com/search?q=Progress+Software+to+Acquire+Telerik+for+%24263+Million https://www.google.com/search?q=Progress+Software+to+Acquire...
flexie 12y ago
That is one of the most successful Bulgarian companies being acquired. Telerik has been a center piece in the Bulgarian IT sector. There is hardly an IT company here in Sofia that doesn't have at least one employee that has been employed with Telerik or gone through their training programmes.
fit2rule 12y ago
This is a fascinating move for Progress Software, who seem to have managed decades of survival through the onslaught of SQL and MySQL/Postgres cutting into their market .. and so to see them acquiring Telerik now is really interesting. Progress were, once, one of the major players in the database space (and still are in many vertical markets) so it could really be an interesting development to see them rise again. Could be with this acquisition they are gearing up for a new era in database development...
- the_ancient 12y ago
  They survive because of vendor lockin, too many companies have years or decades of work in to using that system and it would be far too costly to move. If your starting a project from scratch today you are not using progress, Legacy is their only business. They know it, which is why they are buying up companies like this.
  - kamikazi 12y ago
    Bingo! I came across Progress first time this week in a different context (Indian startup scene) - they portray themselves as incubators here (https://www.progress.com/incubator https://www.progress.com/incubator). Have a fancy application system et al.. even stress how they don't take any equity. Turns out in lieu of essentially a deskspace and maybe wifi they mandate the incubated startups to use their Cloud platform products - aha lockin! This is how shitty enterprises survive. When they can't find new customers, they come to India and tomtom around as evangelists & incubators and other $100 words in self-description.
    - fit2rule 12y ago
      Well, to be fair, Progress has had traction in India as an application environment for decades now, so it only makes sense that there be an iCloud'ification of their whole product line - all the cool kids are doing it..
- astral303 12y ago
  I remember using the Progress database, 4GL and all, and it was a painful experience. I remember being very surprised that in mid-2000's, it didn't automatically optimize a query like "A>B and X=Y". It ended up running A>B first, which pulled in most of a huge table, instead of running X=Y, which was much narrower. I thought it was a basic query optimization heuristic to prioritize equality constraints, so I thought it was unacceptable for an enterprise SQL database in mid-2000's to not have that.
  - fit2rule 12y ago
    I think in Progress' 4GL, you basically had 'the power' to use ()'s to hint at your preference. I dunno though, been a looooong time (1989) since I wrote any Progress 4GL code. Been mostly a MySQL/PostgreSQL user since then, although I confess to being more inclined to NoSQL these days .. :)
sireat 12y ago
I did not realize that Telerik was of Bulgarian origin. That is a pretty sizable exit.
ninv 12y ago
Telerik makes awful .Net components. I have used them in past. I was frustrated with their breaking changes, they had the worst release management. Every year they used to release new version and used to outright removed the methods or replace the signatures. No Deprecation!
- swalsh 12y ago
  We're using the kendo ui mvvm, It seems like they forked knockout js, and just did their own thing. It's kind of awful. I kind of wish I had fought harder to use Angular js.
  - CmonDev 12y ago
    ...and now they are working on their own JavaScript-for-mobile-apps language - what could possibly go wrong: http://www.telerik.com/nativescript http://www.telerik.com/nativescript
  - crescentfresh 12y ago
    Kendo is indeed a "fork" of many things. Knockout, Backbone, underscore templates with different delimiters, bootstrap, many existing ui widgets (chosen comes to mind). About the only thing they didn't fork was jQuery itself. But at least you get all of the above in a single product. I guess that's a bonus? I have personally fought to work around their widgets more times than I've worked with them. And have dropped integrating their widgets into new projects, to avoid the bloat/overhead.
    - junto 12y ago
      We are still using the original ASP.NET MVC extensions that they released as open source before they went on to develop Kendo. I've used a fair few .NET controls from various vendors and they all are challenging in different ways. The common problem is that they force you to do things in a particular way. If I was to rebuild our product it would not be using any of this heavy backend style server controls. It is history as far as I can see. JavaScript front-end frameworks and REST services even with .NET is where Microsoft seem to be headed as well.
imroot 12y ago
Progresses' database is an interesting and very powerful product, but, I'm not sure that this will be beneficial to anyone who isn't really familiar with the verticals and integrations that Progress owns. I know that I've seen progress used by running MFP/ERP suites that are used by automotive and manufacturing companies.
anonymousDan 12y ago
What does telerik actually do/sell out of interest?
- atwebb 12y ago
  Although I'm sure they do other things, they sell .Net components, kind of a "create grids/reporting/tables" with no code or UI development toolkit.
malkia 12y ago
I have several friends there. I've never used their products (neither .Net or .js) but can't be happier for them :)
hipsterrific 12y ago
Telerik wasn't half bad when I was the only .net developer for a hospital system with 3,000 employees. It made short work for me since building AJAX-y controls meant less time building business rules. The controls are really bad, they produce a lot of awful JS. Also, with newer frameworks such as angular, knockout, ember, et al...building reusable JS components got simpler. I haven't yet used KendoUI but haven't had a need too, building my own was far more fun (and with OData, not that much time either). I did use their reporting product a lot but even that was too heavy and cumbersome.
modarts 12y ago
It's amazing the kind of crap you can produce in the enterprise space and get away with it to the tune of multi hundred million dollar acquisitions.
shadowzero313 12y ago
Just got their email to the devs: Today, we’re excited to announce that Telerik has entered into an agreement to be acquired by Progress Software (progress.com <http://info.telerik.com/UoQy00P0TG0TOJ003C000AR> http://info.telerik.com/UoQy00P0TG0TOJ003C000AR>), a U.S.-based public company that specializes in the development, deployment, integration and management of a deep suite of business applications. They’ve been in business since 1981 and their technology is used by nearly 140,000 organizations in more than 180 countries, including 90% of the Fortune 500. By becoming part of Progress, Telerik will have the support and resources to continue delivering on its grand ambitions to change the way people develop applications for the modern world. Telerik will preserve its identity and its brand name. As we chase our ambition with more energy than ever before, we promise to stay true to the values that have guided us since our humble beginnings, including taking care of our customers and employees; evolving together with you as the world changes; going the extra mile; reinventing ourselves; innovating; creating great products; and continuing to “deliver more than expected” every day in our quest to create a better digital world. We’re committed to keeping our promises as we will be joining a company that shares a similar philosophy, bold vision and is driven to reinvent itself. Telerik and Progress have very complementary product portfolios, business models and expertise. This will make both of us stronger and more capable to deliver on our shared vision: to help individual developers and enterprises build modern applications across platforms and devices. Please know that your relationship with Telerik is not changing as a result of this transaction. You should continue contacting us in the same ways you always have. Connect with the same Telerik staff members you’re used to. Read our thought leadership content on TDN. Submit your issues and product features requests. Telerik remains fully committed to continuing to empower every one of you with our industry-leading UI tools, platform, and cloud services. We will continue to innovate and improve all of our products. Our 1.4 million developers and 130,000 companies depend on Telerik day in and day out to get their jobs done as effectively as possible and we treat your investment and trust very seriously. You can expect the same level of relentless focus and passion we have always delivered. We are here to stay and will continue to be your trusted partner and enable you to develop the greatest experiences possible for your customers. Last, but not least – a VERY BIG THANK YOU! Without the trust of every one of you, our customers, Telerik would have never become what it is today. We are very excited about being able to serve you well in the future. Telerik founders and senior leadership will continue to drive the Telerik vision and strategy as part of Progress Software and we’d love to hear from you! You can reach us at: Telerikprogress@telerik.com. Yours truly, Svetozar Georgiev and Vassil Terziev Co-Founders and Co-CEOS, Telerik
venomsnake 12y ago
The rumors in Sofia were that the company was going downhill. This seems to confirm it. I really tried to like their products. Didn't managed. And they flooded the market with half trained "developers" from their academy.
- gchokov 12y ago
  And how exactly is 263M for 10 years "going downhill"?
  - x1024 12y ago
    Every large number sounds impressive, don't get yourself caught in that mind-trap. Divide the number by their employees, check earnings/winnings, subtract investments, compare to other companies and draw your conclusions again. If I make $1000000/year, that's great. But if it takes me 1000 people to do it, that's less than $100 per person per month.
    - rational-future 12y ago
      It was bootstrapped, from what I know the original 4 founders used to own 80% of the company a year or so ago.
      - x1024 12y ago
        What you know is false, sorry.
    - llcoolv 12y ago
      And what if they started with 4 and ended up with a 1000?
  - venomsnake 12y ago
    Its called aquihire. Its also one seventh tumblr and rounding error of whatsapp.
    - 12y ago
patja 12y ago
I just hope Carl and Richard at the .NET Rocks podcast can find a new sponsor or figure out some other option to keep their great show going. Seems like Telerik has been their main sponsor forever.
- traskjd 12y ago
  Richard is (was?) on the board of Telerik also. I've contacted DNR to try and organise sponsorship and never heard back from them.
rogerthis 12y ago
Having HN as the only source of information is not a good thing. I didn't know who Progress Corp were, and I would not know Telerik if my brother, who works in big corporate, had not told me sometime ago.
Avalaxy 12y ago
Hmmmm, apparently I'm the only one here with a positive experience. I've used their Windows Phone and Windows 8 components and I really really like them. They are much, much faster than their opensource counterparts, they are very flexible and advanced and Telerik's support is great. I always get answers within 24 hours, and they often provide a complete solution/project with samples.
- gchokov 12y ago
  You are not the only one. People tend to share the negative stuff first though. No company like Telerik can reach this state without a value given to their customers.
  - rational-future 12y ago
    HN has become very negative in the recent years. Only stuff build by Apple and Google gets mostly positive comments.
mwg66 12y ago
Good for them. The Telerik .NET controls are an overall a positive experience.
Arnavion 12y ago
I hope Fiddler remains free...

73 points by johandt 12y ago

bless1 12y ago

Telerik makes awful

digibo 12y ago
Did you just create an account to say a half of a negative sentence? o_O

uptown 12y ago

For non-subscribers: https://www.google.com/search?q=Progress+Software+to+Acquire+Telerik+for+%24263+Million https://www.google.com/search?q=Progress+Software+to+Acquire...

flexie 12y ago

That is one of the most successful Bulgarian companies being acquired. Telerik has been a center piece in the Bulgarian IT sector. There is hardly an IT company here in Sofia that doesn't have at least one employee that has been employed with Telerik or gone through their training programmes.

fit2rule 12y ago

This is a fascinating move for Progress Software, who seem to have managed decades of survival through the onslaught of SQL and MySQL/Postgres cutting into their market .. and so to see them acquiring Telerik now is really interesting. Progress were, once, one of the major players in the database space (and still are in many vertical markets) so it could really be an interesting development to see them rise again. Could be with this acquisition they are gearing up for a new era in database development...

the_ancient 12y ago
They survive because of vendor lockin, too many companies have years or decades of work in to using that system and it would be far too costly to move. If your starting a project from scratch today you are not using progress, Legacy is their only business. They know it, which is why they are buying up companies like this.
- kamikazi 12y ago
  Bingo! I came across Progress first time this week in a different context (Indian startup scene) - they portray themselves as incubators here (https://www.progress.com/incubator https://www.progress.com/incubator). Have a fancy application system et al.. even stress how they don't take any equity. Turns out in lieu of essentially a deskspace and maybe wifi they mandate the incubated startups to use their Cloud platform products - aha lockin! This is how shitty enterprises survive. When they can't find new customers, they come to India and tomtom around as evangelists & incubators and other $100 words in self-description.
  - fit2rule 12y ago
    Well, to be fair, Progress has had traction in India as an application environment for decades now, so it only makes sense that there be an iCloud'ification of their whole product line - all the cool kids are doing it..
astral303 12y ago
I remember using the Progress database, 4GL and all, and it was a painful experience. I remember being very surprised that in mid-2000's, it didn't automatically optimize a query like "A>B and X=Y". It ended up running A>B first, which pulled in most of a huge table, instead of running X=Y, which was much narrower. I thought it was a basic query optimization heuristic to prioritize equality constraints, so I thought it was unacceptable for an enterprise SQL database in mid-2000's to not have that.
- fit2rule 12y ago
  I think in Progress' 4GL, you basically had 'the power' to use ()'s to hint at your preference. I dunno though, been a looooong time (1989) since I wrote any Progress 4GL code. Been mostly a MySQL/PostgreSQL user since then, although I confess to being more inclined to NoSQL these days .. :)

sireat 12y ago

I did not realize that Telerik was of Bulgarian origin. That is a pretty sizable exit.

ninv 12y ago

Telerik makes awful .Net components. I have used them in past. I was frustrated with their breaking changes, they had the worst release management. Every year they used to release new version and used to outright removed the methods or replace the signatures. No Deprecation!

swalsh 12y ago
We're using the kendo ui mvvm, It seems like they forked knockout js, and just did their own thing. It's kind of awful. I kind of wish I had fought harder to use Angular js.
- CmonDev 12y ago
  ...and now they are working on their own JavaScript-for-mobile-apps language - what could possibly go wrong: http://www.telerik.com/nativescript http://www.telerik.com/nativescript
- crescentfresh 12y ago
  Kendo is indeed a "fork" of many things. Knockout, Backbone, underscore templates with different delimiters, bootstrap, many existing ui widgets (chosen comes to mind). About the only thing they didn't fork was jQuery itself. But at least you get all of the above in a single product. I guess that's a bonus? I have personally fought to work around their widgets more times than I've worked with them. And have dropped integrating their widgets into new projects, to avoid the bloat/overhead.
  - junto 12y ago
    We are still using the original ASP.NET MVC extensions that they released as open source before they went on to develop Kendo. I've used a fair few .NET controls from various vendors and they all are challenging in different ways. The common problem is that they force you to do things in a particular way. If I was to rebuild our product it would not be using any of this heavy backend style server controls. It is history as far as I can see. JavaScript front-end frameworks and REST services even with .NET is where Microsoft seem to be headed as well.

imroot 12y ago

Progresses' database is an interesting and very powerful product, but, I'm not sure that this will be beneficial to anyone who isn't really familiar with the verticals and integrations that Progress owns. I know that I've seen progress used by running MFP/ERP suites that are used by automotive and manufacturing companies.

anonymousDan 12y ago

What does telerik actually do/sell out of interest?

atwebb 12y ago
Although I'm sure they do other things, they sell .Net components, kind of a "create grids/reporting/tables" with no code or UI development toolkit.

malkia 12y ago

I have several friends there. I've never used their products (neither .Net or .js) but can't be happier for them :)

hipsterrific 12y ago

Telerik wasn't half bad when I was the only .net developer for a hospital system with 3,000 employees. It made short work for me since building AJAX-y controls meant less time building business rules. The controls are really bad, they produce a lot of awful JS. Also, with newer frameworks such as angular, knockout, ember, et al...building reusable JS components got simpler. I haven't yet used KendoUI but haven't had a need too, building my own was far more fun (and with OData, not that much time either). I did use their reporting product a lot but even that was too heavy and cumbersome.

modarts 12y ago

It's amazing the kind of crap you can produce in the enterprise space and get away with it to the tune of multi hundred million dollar acquisitions.

shadowzero313 12y ago

Just got their email to the devs: Today, we’re excited to announce that Telerik has entered into an agreement to be acquired by Progress Software (progress.com <http://info.telerik.com/UoQy00P0TG0TOJ003C000AR> http://info.telerik.com/UoQy00P0TG0TOJ003C000AR>), a U.S.-based public company that specializes in the development, deployment, integration and management of a deep suite of business applications. They’ve been in business since 1981 and their technology is used by nearly 140,000 organizations in more than 180 countries, including 90% of the Fortune 500. By becoming part of Progress, Telerik will have the support and resources to continue delivering on its grand ambitions to change the way people develop applications for the modern world. Telerik will preserve its identity and its brand name. As we chase our ambition with more energy than ever before, we promise to stay true to the values that have guided us since our humble beginnings, including taking care of our customers and employees; evolving together with you as the world changes; going the extra mile; reinventing ourselves; innovating; creating great products; and continuing to “deliver more than expected” every day in our quest to create a better digital world. We’re committed to keeping our promises as we will be joining a company that shares a similar philosophy, bold vision and is driven to reinvent itself. Telerik and Progress have very complementary product portfolios, business models and expertise. This will make both of us stronger and more capable to deliver on our shared vision: to help individual developers and enterprises build modern applications across platforms and devices. Please know that your relationship with Telerik is not changing as a result of this transaction. You should continue contacting us in the same ways you always have. Connect with the same Telerik staff members you’re used to. Read our thought leadership content on TDN. Submit your issues and product features requests. Telerik remains fully committed to continuing to empower every one of you with our industry-leading UI tools, platform, and cloud services. We will continue to innovate and improve all of our products. Our 1.4 million developers and 130,000 companies depend on Telerik day in and day out to get their jobs done as effectively as possible and we treat your investment and trust very seriously. You can expect the same level of relentless focus and passion we have always delivered. We are here to stay and will continue to be your trusted partner and enable you to develop the greatest experiences possible for your customers. Last, but not least – a VERY BIG THANK YOU! Without the trust of every one of you, our customers, Telerik would have never become what it is today. We are very excited about being able to serve you well in the future. Telerik founders and senior leadership will continue to drive the Telerik vision and strategy as part of Progress Software and we’d love to hear from you! You can reach us at: Telerikprogress@telerik.com. Yours truly, Svetozar Georgiev and Vassil Terziev Co-Founders and Co-CEOS, Telerik

venomsnake 12y ago

The rumors in Sofia were that the company was going downhill. This seems to confirm it. I really tried to like their products. Didn't managed. And they flooded the market with half trained "developers" from their academy.

gchokov 12y ago
And how exactly is 263M for 10 years "going downhill"?
- x1024 12y ago
  Every large number sounds impressive, don't get yourself caught in that mind-trap. Divide the number by their employees, check earnings/winnings, subtract investments, compare to other companies and draw your conclusions again. If I make $1000000/year, that's great. But if it takes me 1000 people to do it, that's less than $100 per person per month.
  - rational-future 12y ago
    It was bootstrapped, from what I know the original 4 founders used to own 80% of the company a year or so ago.
    - x1024 12y ago
      What you know is false, sorry.
  - llcoolv 12y ago
    And what if they started with 4 and ended up with a 1000?
- venomsnake 12y ago
  Its called aquihire. Its also one seventh tumblr and rounding error of whatsapp.
  - 12y ago

patja 12y ago

I just hope Carl and Richard at the .NET Rocks podcast can find a new sponsor or figure out some other option to keep their great show going. Seems like Telerik has been their main sponsor forever.

traskjd 12y ago
Richard is (was?) on the board of Telerik also. I've contacted DNR to try and organise sponsorship and never heard back from them.

rogerthis 12y ago

Having HN as the only source of information is not a good thing. I didn't know who Progress Corp were, and I would not know Telerik if my brother, who works in big corporate, had not told me sometime ago.

Avalaxy 12y ago

Hmmmm, apparently I'm the only one here with a positive experience. I've used their Windows Phone and Windows 8 components and I really really like them. They are much, much faster than their opensource counterparts, they are very flexible and advanced and Telerik's support is great. I always get answers within 24 hours, and they often provide a complete solution/project with samples.

gchokov 12y ago
You are not the only one. People tend to share the negative stuff first though. No company like Telerik can reach this state without a value given to their customers.
- rational-future 12y ago
  HN has become very negative in the recent years. Only stuff build by Apple and Google gets mostly positive comments.

mwg66 12y ago

Good for them. The Telerik .NET controls are an overall a positive experience.

Arnavion 12y ago

I hope Fiddler remains free...