Bedford's Progress Software cutting up to 260 jobs as part of restructuring plan

The dramatic refocusing follows a five-month reevaluation process led by chief executive Jay Bhatt, who joined Progress in December. Should the contingency arise to the layoffs, Progress is reducing the kinds of software it sells and shifting more of the company's offerings to the cloud, meaning that they will be operated on remote servers and accessed via the Internet, to put it more exactly than being installed and run on clients' computers.

"We intend to evolve Progress into a leaner company that will help to lead the computing evolution from on-premise to the cloud,'' Bhatt said in a statement Wednesday.

The realignment

The realignment and cutbacks at Progress come as the research industry has been growing, especially in the area of cloud-based services. The moves indicate Progress will more aggressively pursue that part of the software sector, said Dennis Gaughan, an analyst who covers application strategy at Gartner Inc., based in Stamford, Conn.

The company's line of work is not easy to describe. In substance, it makes software that other companies use to improve their own software, as a general rule for business applications.

As it shifts more of its resources to online computing, Progress plans to sell off its "middleware'' products, which bundle various innovation products for corporate clients. Declining middleware software sales caused Progress's profits to fall 64 percent, to $7.5 million, in the first quarter of the 2012 fiscal year that began in December, compared with the same period last year.

For fiscal year 2011, Progress recorded revenue of $533.6 million, an increase of 1 percent compared with the $529.1 million it generated in 2010.