Sonic Software's Bill Cullen Named to InfoWorld's List of 2005 Innovators; Cullen Named to Innovator's Hall of Fame for Extending the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) as the Platform of Choice for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).

BEDFORD, Mass. -- Sonic Software (www.sonicsoftware.com), the inventor and leading provider of the enterprise service bus (ESB), today announced that Vice President of Engineering Bill Cullen has been named to InfoWorld Magazine's Innovators 2005, for his work on the development of Sonic ESB(R), the leading enterprise service bus, and Sonic Continuous Availability Architecture(TM) (CAA). A profile of Cullen and the other winners appears in the August 1 issue of InfoWorld and is available online at http://www.infoworld.com/reports/31SRinnovators2005.html.

According to the InfoWorld profile on Cullen, "If the SOA movement had an official flag, on that flag would be a diagram of an ESB (enterprise service bus). And if you dotted the flag with the logos of leading SOA vendors, Sonic Software's would surely have to stand out from the rest. As vice president of engineering at Sonic Software, Bill Cullen has led the development of the Sonic ESB and its CAA (Continuous Availability Architecture), a fail-over mechanism that not only guarantees message delivery, but reduces recovery time to mere seconds, all on inexpensive hardware. You might call it a service-oriented approach to fail-over."

"By abandoning business as usual, these honorees are striking new paths to efficiency and reliability across the board, from more vigilant security systems to robust Web services architectures," said Richard Gincel, InfoWorld associate editor. "Thanks to the ideas and efforts of these groundbreaking individuals, technology advancements on several fronts--XQuery, Event Stream Processing and SOA, to name a few--are gaining momentum. In turn, we are pleased to honor those who are leading the way with their ingenuity."

Recognizing the need for a new kind of infrastructure capable of connecting, mediating and controlling large-scale networks of services, Sonic Software introduced the first ESB in March of 2002. Since that time, leading industry research firms, influential publications, industry competitors and, most importantly, enterprise customers have validated Sonic's early vision, establishing ESB as the critical infrastructure for supporting enterprise SOA requirements.

"Bill Cullen was instrumental in leading the development of the world's first enterprise service bus. He and his team continue to set the standard for this technology with advances such as the Sonic Continuous Availability Architecture," said Greg O'Connor, president of Sonic Software. "As companies build SOAs, they require the type of cutting-edge SOA infrastructure software that Sonic provides. Cullen's pioneering work has been a driving force in the emergence of ESBs and he is greatly deserving of this recognition as an InfoWorld Innovator."

The Sonic CAA is a software-based approach for providing high availability and guaranteed message delivery. For more information about Sonic ESB, the Sonic SOA Suite(TM), and Sonic's entire product line, please visit: www.sonicsoftware.com/products.

About Sonic Software

Sonic Software is the inventor and leading provider of the enterprise service bus (ESB), a new communication and integration infrastructure that supports the enterprise requirements of a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Sonic's technology delivers the scalability, security, continuous availability and management capabilities necessary to connect, integrate and control distributed, mission critical business processes. Over 1,000 customers use Sonic products to achieve broad-scale interoperability of IT systems and the flexibility to adapt these systems to ever-changing business needs.

Sonic Software is an independent operating company of Progress Software Corporation (Nasdaq: PRGS), a US$360+ million global software industry leader. Headquartered in Bedford, Mass., Sonic Software can be reached on the Web at http://www.sonicsoftware.com, or by phone at [phone] or 1-866-GET-SONIC.

Sonic ESB, Sonic SOA Suite, Sonic Continuous Availability Architecture and Sonic Software (and design) are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sonic Software Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. Any other trademarks or service marks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.