Supercorp CEO Kurt Groeneveld told iTWire that his company - which develops software for accountants and institutions serving the SMSF sector - has been using Progress since 1984.
It was adopted because of its robustness: if the computer crashes, the database self-repairs on restart. That was very unusual at that time, he said, and "that robustness is still a key part of our decision-making."
"The data is so important, said Mr Groeneveld, and "The [Progress] database is bulletproof" and provides "literally lights-out management."
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It is now actively marketing its software to accounting firms, and is seeing a huge increase in the number of new clients without existing software, largely because of the requirement to use the SuperStream standard for contributions data and payments.
Progress VP of SaaS and cloud Colleen Smith told iTWire that Supercorp was a good example of the way SaaS can be used to reach new markets. In this case the company wanted to serve smaller customers.
The move had been good for Supercorp and good for Progress, she said. Revenue to Progress has increased over 100% year-on-year as a result.
Supercorp's main competitors are Class Super and BGL. Both have cloud product developed within last five years, so there is pressure on Supercorp to innovate, said Mr Groeneveld.
There are around 520,000 self-managed superannuation funds in Australia, and Supercorp provides administrative services for about 10%; BGL has around 50% of the market, he said, and Class has 10%.
Retirees like to know how others are faring - and cloud software makes it easy to provide benchmarking against other funds. "Everyone likes comparisons of data," he observed.
Mr Groeneveld said that while Supercorp has to empower its clients, it is important to reach their clients and engage them, as that helps build Supercorp's clients' businesses.
Although Supercorp is a long term user of the Progress OpenEdge database, it does not use the company's entire portfolio.
It uses Microsoft's .Net family for most development, along with the Bootstrap framework for web. "Rollbase wasn't the right solution for us" because our focus is on presenting interpretative data, he explained.
But Supercorp is just starting to use the Progress Corticon business rules management product, as this has the potential to provide savings when making future changes to the system. "Corticon is an interesting option."
Frequent changes are necessary in response to legislation and other regulations: "whatever affects financial services in some way affects superannuation," he said.
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There are several opportunities to apply Corticon, Mr Groeneveld said, including using rules to indicate where end clients should invest. But the company has to avoid giving financial advice, limiting its role in this area to providing tools for trustees.
Supercorp's software uses single-tenant databases (large clients are more comfortable with that, he said), with a multi-tenant application. The system is hosted by the same provider that the ASX uses, he said.
The company has begun using analytics to determine what features of the product is being used, with a view to stripping out those that aren't.
But the decision to remove any feature is not based solely on usage data. Supercorp also consults its product advisory council, which is selected to be representative of the user base.
Plans to remove certain features have already been revised based on their feedback. In one case, the response was along the lines of "just because we haven't used that feature recently, that doesn't mean we won't need to apply it again to old data somewhere down the track."
AMP is not only a customer of Supercorp, it owns 20% of company, Mr Groeneveld holds a majority stake, and there's also a venture capital investment by Washington H. Soul Pattinson - "they've been a great investor" willing to take the longer view, Mr Groeneveld said.
Disclosure: The writer travelled to the Progress Exchange conference as the guest of the company.
