Eye on Asian market
Gearing products to the Asian market and strong customer support are vital to a firm's success in the region, according to Jack Chow, a senior manager at Progress Software.
Mr Chow is the company's new technical manager for North Asia, responsible for structuring the firm's client technical support team, helping to develop products for the regional market and organising training courses.
Progress, whose headquarters are in the United States, is a supplier of application development and database software.
One of its top products is WebSpeed 1.0, a development tool that enables users to build transaction processing applications on the Internet and corporate intranets.
Mr Chow said that although WebSpeed was the first transaction processing product on the market, Progress was aware of the encroaching competition.
Progress aims to keep ahead by accelerating the localisation of its software into double-byte languages such as simplified and traditional Chinese and Korean, a project which will be led by Mr Chow.
He said reliable technical support was another key way to compete effectively in the software industry and Progress offered an excellent service.
'I feel I can contribute directly because of my previous experience,' he said. 'Using the small number of staff we have, we can maximise the virtues of our software to stand against the bigger companies like Oracle and Sybase.' Mr Chow was previously a senior project manager with Electronic Data Systems and is also a former manager of Wang Pacific's Asia support centre.
He has restructured Progress' procedures for its four technical specialists to ensure they make best use of their internal resources.
One way was to have them refer to Progress' on-line database, a simple instruction that shortened the learning curve, Mr Chow said.
Available only to Progress customers via the Internet, a home page has a troubleshooting section that lists solutions to previously experienced problems.
