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Since its foundation in the semi-converted surgery of a Massachusetts dentist 24 years ago, Progress Software has made a virtue out of being a technology leader without ever quite mastering the skill of also achieving market leadership. Perhaps, this is all about to change.

Certainly, Progress's 2004 $25 million capture of the little known, but highly regarded supplier of event stream processing (ESP) technology, Apama, was not a bet on maintaining the status quo. The ink had hardly dried on the deal before Apama was bundled with Progress's ObjectStore Division, and the whole unit had become Progress Real Time Division.

For a company that has largely dedicated itself to developing mainstream technologies for a broad constituency of third-party application developers and end users, acquisition of a business as exotic as a real-time technology group is a radical move. But it is not an adventure that Progress has entered into on a whim.

The roots of Progress' real-time strategy lie in its acquisition of eXcelon in 2002. This deal fitted well with Progress' established strategy of developing or acquiring application infrastructure technologies - in this case the target was eXcelon's XML technology, including the ObjectStore database.

However, says Mark Palmer, executive VP of Progress' Real Time Division, "when we looked at how people used ObjectStore, whilst some of them were using it for object caching, others were using it as an event database, to manage events and parse them in real-time."

Progress had stumbled on an emerging interest among commercial software users in real-time technologies. In the telecoms sector, for instance, operators were working with object-databases such as ObjectStore to track, process and bill increasingly granular and sophisticated communications services. Financial traders were experimenting with complex event processing (CEP) and ESP technology that could identify and respond in real time, changing business patterns. Even retailers had started to look around for something to help them make timely sense of the masses of data RFID technology was expected to generate.

Twelve months later, Forrester Research started to talk about the future world of "zero latency" business and Gartner declared that event-driven architecture (EDA) - IT capable of responding in real-time to shifting business demands - would be the next "next big thing".

Today, the consensus supporting EDA is hardening. Integration tool vendors, including Progress' own Sonic ESB division, predict that adoption of service oriented architecture (SOA), which allows business processes to be more easily constructed from existing applications, will naturally lead to event-driven working. From EDA, it is a short step to a highly automated business created from the convergence of processes supported by emerging concepts such as business activity monitoring (BAM), CEP and ESP.

Progress is not without competitors. Integration software vendor Tibco has produced a real-time application platform, making it easier to deploy ESP engines against its own integration platform. And a raft of hungry new entrants, such as StreamServe, are jostling for the mindshare of customers contemplating a real-time future. Even Cisco has joined in, pushing its concept of the application-oriented network.

Not for the first time, Progress believes it has already established a technological lead over the competition. As well as ObjectStore and Apama, which is credited with controlling 20% of the emerging ESP market, it has also acquired the technology and customers of DataDirect and Persistence Software.

Together these companies are expected to contribute sales of $29 million, just 7% of Progress' total revenue and a slim return on the $155 million Progress has so far spent building its Real Time Division. However, says Palmer, "we're growing fast" and, so far "there's nobody that has all the technology that we do. We're the only major software company that has focused on real time."

It is hard to argue with Palmer's assertion that Progress has a clear product and technology lead in the emerging real time market. But it remains to be seen whether this will translate into true market leadership, particularly as even proponents of event-driven working do not expect the market to properly take off for at least another three to five years.