Progress to re-energize Its brand

Progress has introduced a fresh new corporate brand identity, including an iconic new logo, emphasizing the spark of business ideas its software provides to customers and partners and its more than 30-year heritage of innovation. The new corporate brand coincides with Progress' launch of a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that enables powerful business applications to be easily created by anyone using a web browser.

Working with North Carolina brand strategy agency New Kind, Progress set out to establish a brand identity that is bold and recognizable but that is also true to the company's strong values. The idea was to create a modern look that would help position Progress alongside major players in the cloud markets like Amazon, Google, Salesforce.com and others.

The new branding is based on the concept that every new business reality begins as an idea, a simple spark. The color orange, which has always been a core element of the Progress brand, is richer and deeper in the new identity and symbolizes the energy and excitement of the company entering a new era. To develop this new brand identity, Progress engaged a passionate community of advocates both inside and outside the company, including employees, partners, and customers. Their collective ideas served as the inspiration for the final creative direction that was unveiled at Progress Exchange 2013, its annual worldwide conference for customers and partners last week in Boston.

Jennifer Smith, chief marketing officer at Progress said, "This new identity — defined by a spark - reflects the company vision of helping our customers and partners turn their ideas into business reality. The new technology we're delivering makes it easy to take the spark of an idea and create powerful data-driven business applications that can run anywhere. The imagery and the color palette reinforce a cohesive brand identity across all of our products and evoke the simplicity and imagination that are at the heart of what Progress offers."

Chris Grams, president of New Kind, said, "The aim of this project was to help Progress collaboratively develop a brand identity with the input of its most passionate community members, including employees, partners, and customers. By bringing the Progress community into the process, we were able to develop an identity that captures key elements of the rich, 30 plus year history of the company while also creating a clean and confident brand foundation for this promising new era of growth."