C
Colleen Smith
Guest
Skyward, a leading provider of K-12 school administrative software, came to Progress with a concern we hear from clients all of the time – they were looking to deliver scalable, high-performance solutions while maintaining an aggressive release schedule and responding to continuous change. Seems easy, right?Well, for a company that serves more than 1,700 school districts with its integrated student, finance, and human resources suite of products, it was a bit of a challenge.
Without software configuration management, the company was finding a number of productivity and quality challenges. They were struggling with source code management. They also had no way to roll back versions which made it difficult to build enhancements and maintain quality. All in all, they needed a more sophisticated approach.
That’s when Skyward began working with our partner Roundtable Total Software Management System (TSMS) to optimize and streamline the Progress OpenEdge development environment. Since then, Skyward’s business has tripled in size and development moved from a Waterfall approach to an agile development methodology. Despite adding more customers, more features, more developers, moving to SaaS and transforming their internal development strategy, Roundtable TSMS has kept pace with Skyward every step of the way.
In fact, Skyward has evolved into a strong industry leader having grown its business by a factor of three and scaling to support districts with upwards of 75,000 students. For close to 20 years the company has relied on the OpenEdge platform to help deliver state-of-the-art, competitive solutions.
Seven years ago, Skyward developed a SaaS offering of its solutions to penetrate new markets, increase its incremental revenue, and reduce both the sales and implementation cycle time. Progress provided resources to help them during their transition. Specifically, we helped them by providing SaaS business expertise and taking part in various Partner+ Program empowerment offerings to understand how SaaS can impact a business, how to mitigate risks, and changes to make from a marketing/sales perspective to support the new business model.
In an industry that is cautious about spending, moving to the cloud has given Skyward’s customers access to state-of-the-art systems without high up-front costs. Making Skyward accessible and far more appealing to school districts which are looking to stay within a budget or accelerate implementation time.
Progress’ continued innovation and commitment to the Partner+ Program have been key to the long and successful partnership we’ve enjoyed with Skyward. For more information, check out the Skyward case study and read how OpenEdge can help grow your business.
Author information
Vice President, SaaS and Cloud at Progress Software
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