Progress Actional Closes SOA Governance Gap Identified in Industry Survey.

Only 17% of Organizations Believe Approach to Service-oriented Architecture Governance Is Sufficient

BEDFORD, Mass. -- Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS), a provider of leading application infrastructure software to develop, deploy, integrate and manage business applications, today announced the results of a SOA Governance survey that gathered feedback from IT representatives in 21 industries, including financial services, banking, government, insurance, healthcare and pharmaceutical. The survey revealed that governance is not keeping pace with the adoption of service-oriented architectures (SOAs) at most organizations.

The online survey, conducted in August by eBizQ and sponsored by Progress, consisted of 313 respondents. While the survey showed that the majority of organizations are actively pursuing SOA, most are relying on manual processes to enforce SOA governance. Less than 6% have automated runtime monitoring of policies and fewer than 5% automatically check services for policy enforcement before services are checked into a repository.

As the leading provider of run-time SOA governance products, through its Actional[R] product line, Progress sponsored this survey to assess the current state of industry preparedness and to raise awareness of the need for governance solutions. The complete results of this survey are included in the eBizQ white paper "The Current State of SOA Governance." It can be accessed at: www.actional.com/soasurvey.

"SOA is more of a business initiative than an IT initiative. Organizations must do a better job of setting and enforcing governance policies in order for their SOA to properly support key business objectives," said Beth Gold-Bernstein, director of the eBizQ Training Center. "Automated solutions for both design time and runtime governance are necessary to effectively manage SOA implementations. Insufficient governance capabilities will negatively impact business agility and service reuse, the top drivers behind SOA adoption."

Among the survey findings:

* 65% of the companies surveyed are actively pursuing SOA in the form of planning, pilots or production deployments. Most organizations are starting with a small number of services and taking an incremental approach to growing their SOA.

* 64% of respondents cited increased business agility as the most important reason to build a SOA. Other frequently mentioned drivers were IT reuse and business process optimization.

* 94% of respondents either have no methods for governing SOAs or rely on manual processes such as design reviews, manual audits and after-the-fact reporting.

* The biggest governance issues reported in the survey are enforcing policies at runtime and managing the effects of policy change in both the design and runtime environments.

"The most important benefit of SOA is the potential to align IT with the business and sustain that alignment over time. That will only happen if effective governance is in place," said Dan Foody, Sonic and Actional Products CTO, Progress Software. "Whether organizations are just starting SOA projects or have a fully deployed SOA, it's imperative that they have the ability to see and manage all services in the enterprise. Actional products provide the full service runtime governance and policy driven, automated enforcement that organizations require to achieve higher levels of service reuse and business agility. We help organizations close the governance gap."

About Progress Actional

Progress([R]) Actional([R]) Web services management and SOA governance products provide visibility, security and control of the activities of services and end-to-end business processes in a runtime environment. Actional Web services management and SOA governance capabilities include system and process-level visibility, as well as policy enforcement across an SOA infrastructure deployed on any combination of platforms. For information on Actional products, see www.progress.com/actional.

About Progress Software Corporation

Progress Software Corporation (Nasdaq: PRGS) is a global industry leader providing application infrastructure software for all aspects of the development, deployment, integration and management of business applications. Headquartered in Bedford, Mass., Progress can be reached at www.progress.com or [phone].

Progress and Actional are registered trademarks of Progress Software Corporation or one of its subsidiaries or affiliates in the US and other countries. Any other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.