Progress Software Releases Sonic ESB 7.5.

Latest Version of Market-Leading Enterprise Service Bus Adds BPEL Server, and Extends Capabilities with SOA Management and Data Integration

BEDFORD, Mass. -- Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS), a global supplier of application infrastructure software used to develop, deploy, integrate and manage business applications, today announced the immediate availability of Progress([R]) Sonic ESB([R]) 7.5, the latest version of the worldwide best-selling enterprise service bus (ESB)1 that enables the integration and flexible re-use of business applications within a service-oriented architecture (SOA). This release adds full WS-BPEL 2.0 support to the Sonic ESB Product Family with the new Sonic BPEL Server. In addition, it provides SOA management and common data model management through integration with the Progress Actional([R])and ProgressDataXtend[TM] Semantic Integrator (SI) products.

Sonic BPEL Server

The Progress Sonic[TM] BPEL Server adds sophisticated, standards-based service orchestration to the intelligent routing capabilities of Sonic ESB. It improves developer productivity by simplifying the building, testing and deployment of sophisticated service orchestration that integrates with heterogeneous end-points throughout the enterprise.

Through the drag-and-drop graphical user interface of the Eclipse-based Progress Sonic Workbench development environment, the Sonic BPEL Server enables service composition and event correlation with zero programming. In addition, Sonic's patent-pending distributed debugging technology supports integrated development, testing and debugging of distributed BPEL orchestration, intelligent routing, and integration services--all simultaneously from Sonic Workbench. This unique Sonic capability extends the visibility and control expected from BPEL debugging into the distributed environment it orchestrates, unlike development environments which treat the world outside as a "black-box." The Sonic BPEL Server also leverages the reliability, flexibility and reach of the Sonic ESB product to meet large-scale integration requirements, while preserving 100 percent native BPEL portability.

"Progress has done a great job integrating BPEL into the Sonic ESB environment," said Asif Ali, Chief Engineer, SAIC, a leading systems, solutions, and technical services company. "By seamlessly combining the intelligent routing capabilities of Sonic ESB with BPEL's standards-based orchestration, Progress offers our organization the widest breadth of choices and capabilities. The fact that we can develop and debug distributed implementations of BPEL, intelligent routing, and integration services from within the Sonic Eclipse environment makes it all that much more powerful. We chose Sonic ESB because it can scale to meet our distributed architecture needs. Sonic ESB 7.5 makes it even easier to develop complex orchestrations in this kind of environment."

"An SOA approach promotes the use of more configurable development techniques such as abstracting out business process orchestration alongside standardized services, helping to create more adaptable solutions than with previous generations of hard-coded systems," said Sandra Rogers, Program Director for SOA, Web services, and Integration research at IDC. "The ability to automate integration flows and data transformations, orchestrate processes, and manage services in a more coordinated fashion across various elements of the supporting infrastructure can raise levels of efficiency and help enforce consistency across an SOA environment."

End-to-end SOA management

Sonic ESB 7.5 integrates with Progress Actional for SOA management, enhancing visibility and control of activities across the Sonic ESB as well as the entire SOA infrastructure with which it connects. Users can automatically detect service level violations and instantly trace their root causes for visual display and countermeasures. Through this integration, Sonic ESB gains capabilities only Actional can provide with immeasurably low overhead and the capacity to scale across the enterprise SOA.

Common data model management

Sonic ESB 7.5 also introduces development and runtime integration with Progress DataXtend SI, which dramatically simplifies common data model lifecycle management, transformation and validation. It integrates with Sonic ESB development and runtime, leveraging common Eclipse-based tooling and the ability to deploy semantic services in ESB containers. As Sonic ESB helps organizations eliminate rigid architectures of point-to-point service connections, DataXtend SI solves the problem of point-to-point data transformations, making it much easier to integrate data and evolve an SOA with diverse connected systems.

These newly integrated capabilities complement Sonic ESB, which eliminates the rigidity and fragility of point-to-point integration with a robust, event-driven architecture that can evolve, scale and extend throughout the enterprise. Customers use it to reduce process cycle time, gather and disseminate information, and reliably respond to business conditions as they occur. Used across wide-area networks, security domains, and organizational boundaries, the Sonic ESB product manages the distributed deployment and execution of independently scalable integration services. Through its patent-pending Continuous Availability Architecture (CAA), only Sonic can assure timely and continuous delivery of mission-critical business events.

"Progress advances the state of the art by bringing the power of BPEL, SOA management and common data model management to the Sonic ESB," said Hub Vandervoort, CTO, Enterprise Infrastructure Division at Progress Software. "This release re-draws the lines of competition in the ESB market, making the Sonic ESB the only ESB with full end-to-end operational visibility and integrated common data model management. The product delivers exactly what our customers need to integrate and evolve even the most complex, distributed SOA environments, helping them reduce their operational costs while making their businesses more adaptable to change."

Availability

Sonic ESB 7.5 is available now.

Join Progress for an introduction to Sonic ESB 7.5 on Tuesday, May 15th at 1:00 p.m. EST. To register, go to www.progress.com/sonic.

About Progress Software Corporation

Progress Software Corporation (Nasdaq: PRGS) provides application infrastructure software for the development, deployment, integration and management of business applications. Our goal is to maximize the benefits of information technology while minimizing its complexity and total cost of ownership. Progress can be reached at www.progress.com or [phone].

Progress, Sonic, Sonic ESB, Actional and DataXtend are trademarks or registered trademarks of Progress Software Corporation. Any other trademarks or service marks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.

1 Gartner Dataquest's "Market Share: AIM and Portal Software, Worldwide, 2005," report published June 9, 2006 cites Progress Software's Sonic ESB as the number one in market share at 18.1 percent.