To establish our non-profit status as a 501c6 corporation with the IRS, we have to submit Form 1024 and detail what our organization is going to do for its members.

Doug Lucy finished the second round of elaboration with the lawyers and the Form 1024 will be submitted this coming week. After that, it will take up to six months for the IRS to grant us a Letter of Determination which we then use to prove to vendors taht we are, indeed, non-profit.

The text of the elaboration is, roughly, as follows:

Discussion of business issues and business topics

The Progress application partners (APs) share a common business model: they use Progress technology and tools to develop business software which they then sell to small- and medium-sized businesses. These APs deal with very similar issues and the AP Business Council has been created to allow its members to share their knowledge and experience on these common topics and with these common issues so successes from one member can be utilized by others.

The issues and topics identified include where to find capable and affordable Progress programming talent, how to pay for the ongoing R&D and support solely form the initial maintenance revenue, how to transition from a perpetual license model to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, how to leverage technology to reduce support costs while maintaining or improving support quality and customer satisfaction, which license models (from Progress Software Corporation) are best suited for each vertical market, how to split off some amount of functionality to provide a new product offering for smaller markets, and how to integrate a new web-based user interface to remain competitive without rewriting the entire application.

Quarterly educational webinars

While there are a number of business topics which the AP Business Council members have their own experiences that they can share during teleconferences, there are some topics which need additional depth and/or outside expertise. Many of the APs have participated in a series of workshops known as the “Business Empowerment program” and found their broader business topics to be useful. The AP Business Council will provide similar educational seminars and make them more accessible to tis members by presenting them via webinar.

The topics will be presented by an authority or expert in the field and the topics will be presented in depth over a two hour period. The topics will include marketing a technology solution to business, prototyping a .NET user interface add-on, using modern marketing tools to reach customers, and calculating an acceptable price for SaaS customers.

Annual face-to-face meeting

The number one issue for Progress APs is a lack of sufficient communication at an effective level between themselves and Progress Software Corporation. The annual face-to-face meeting will include an educational segment during which time representatives from Progress Software Corporation (PSC) will convey the licensing and pricing models to the AP members and those members will have the opportunity to ask questions, propose scenarios and build rapport with PSC personnel in order to return to their businesses with actionable plans for licensing and pricing of their products and opportunities.

Business metrics

Progress APs do not close relationships, on a high business-to-business level, with other Progress APs. Without a trade association or multiple close business relationships with peers, each individual AP has no source of data for comparing costs and return.

The business metrics collected by the AP Business Council, averaged and published to its members will give the members a glimpse inside other AP businesses for the purposes of comparison. This ability to compare themselves to their peers will help APs understand where they are spending more money than the normal, where they might invest more time and money to improve their business like another peer’s business, or what kind of ration of expense to return they should strive for in specific areas such as research and development, sales and marketing, product development, support and professional services.
Once each AP is armed with the averaged business metrics from the other members, they can tune their business model to be more efficient, more competitive, and more profitable.