US-based software and platform house Progress has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Bulgarian provider of application development tools Telerik for $262.5m. Telerik is headquartered in Sofia, but has over 200,000 paying developer customers worldwide, including over 450 of the mainly US Fortune 500. Telerik tools enable developers to create cross-platform user experiences across Cloud, web, mobile and desktop applications.
Approximately half of Telerik’s sales are currently generated through a self-service, web-based platform, making it possible for the tools provider to price competitively and still achieve profitability. Telerik’s revenue for the last twelve months was over $60m, with annual bookings growth of over 20%. Progress expects the addition of Telerik to be slightly accretive on a Non-GAAP basis in the first year following the acquisition.
For the past 12 years, Telerik has enabled developers to deliver web, desktop and mobile applications through a comprehensive Cloud-based suite of UI development and application life cycle management tools and a content management system for mobile-enabled, enterprise websites.
More than 4 million users and 47,000 businesses in over 175 countries run applications on the Progress OpenEdge platform and database. With its Pacific and Modulus platform, also the result of recent acquisitions, Progress offers an integrated Cloud and on-premises development platform for applications on cloud or on-premises infrastructure.
Analyst Saugatuck finds the combination of Progress and Telerik “brings together two highly complementary companies, each a recognized leader in application development”. Other, such as Gartner view Progress as an aPaaS visionary and Telerik as a visionary in mobile development and in software quality. Saugatuck sees their combination as highly synergistic, both in terms of functionality and customer base, in which there is little overlap. Progress intends to use Telerik as a lever to encourage its traditional OpenEdge customers to upgrade to current releases and deploy a digital experience quickly and easily.