Sonic Software Announces ESB 7.0 Product Family with New Eclipse Workbench and Advanced Web Services; Sonic ESB 7.0 Improves Productivity Across Project Lifecycle and Addresses Real-World Challenges of Large-Scale, Distributed SOA Deployments.

BEDFORD, Mass. -- Sonic Software, the inventor and leading provider of the enterprise service bus (ESB), and an operating unit of Progress Software Corporation (Nasdaq: PRGS), today introduces the latest release of its highly successful Sonic ESB(R), the cornerstone of Sonic Software's service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure offering. The Sonic ESB 7.0 release includes a new Eclipse-based workbench that dramatically accelerates the modeling, configuration, testing and deployment of projects across large-scale, distributed SOA environments. In addition, Sonic ESB 7.0 introduces an enterprise-grade implementation of the advanced Web services standards necessary for mission-critical SOA deployments.

"It's ironic that despite SOA's mission to break down the silos created by monolithic architectures, most SOA-enablement products are still stuck in the world of silos. That's because they are limited to small-scale projects where everything is built by one team and runs in one place. With ESB 7.0's advanced SOA infrastructure and matching SOA toolset, Sonic is addressing the real-world challenges of SOA that users confront once they move into large-scale, widely distributed deployments," said Gordon Van Huizen, vice president of Sonic products. "Furthermore, with Sonic ESB 7.0 we are delivering the first implementation of advanced Web services suitable for mission-critical deployments, going well beyond the typical check-list level implementations on the market."

Eclipse-based Workbench

The new, Eclipse-based Sonic Workbench(TM) 7.0 provides an integrated SOA toolset to streamline a project lifecycle with the following capabilities:

--Process Modeling--provides a visual, drag-and-drop palette and standards-based business process notation, enabling business analysts to create process flows across distributed services and more effectively collaborate with SOA architects;

--Configuration--enables SOA architects and developers to create services and implement ESB process flows across a distributed topology using point-and-click, metadata-driven configuration models, while preserving access to a drill-down, code-level view;

--Testing & Debugging-- provides the ability to test and debug ESB processes on the desktop and in test environments, as well as triage and diagnose problems in live, distributed deployments. Sonic delivers the first distributed ESB Process Debugger, allowing developers to view and debug a process executing across multiple, distributed services from within the Eclipse environment. Sonic also enables visual step-through debugging of distributed processes as they execute within a live deployment, without disrupting other ongoing processes;

--Deployment--reduces the risk associated with managing change in complex SOA environments by determining the dependencies of composite applications and business processes, and analyzing the impact of promoting these processes into the production environment.

"Several years ago, Online Business Systems saw an opportunity to help customers adopt service-oriented architecture as a way to be more agile and reduce IT costs. We partnered with Sonic Software to make that happen through the enterprise service bus (ESB) and we haven't been disappointed," said Tim Siemens, CTO of Online Business Systems. "SOA introduces unique development challenges that traditional developer tools simply can't address. Sonic ESB 7.0 delivers a whole new set of Eclipse-based tools that rival anything out there in terms of developer productivity, vastly simplifying the SOA project lifecycle across modeling, development, testing and deployment. It will enable Online to more closely integrate our process modeling expertise with our SOA delivery capability, thereby ensuring a closer alignment between business service needs and the technical services that embody them."

Advanced Web Services

Sonic ESB 7.0 provides an implementation of advanced Web services standards for secure and reliable communication between services suitable for mission-critical deployments: WS-ReliableMessaging, WS-Addressing, WS-Security and WS-Policy. The Sonic ESB 7.0 implementation protects complex, distributed SOA systems from communications failures by leveraging Sonic's Continuous Availability Architecture(TM) (CAA). Upon failure, Sonic ESB 7.0 ensures that Web services communications start flowing again immediately, eliminating the hours often required to recover using traditional high-availability hardware and software products. Further, Sonic ESB's unique distributed processes and Dynamic Routing Architecture(TM) (DRA), optimizes performance and simplifies maintenance of orchestrated advanced Web services across LANs and WANs.

Additionally, Sonic ESB 7.0 extends the Sonic Continuous Availability Architecture(TM) (CAA) for high-throughput environments. CAA Fast-Forward is the first reliable messaging technology that eliminates the bottleneck created by disk writes, offering more than an order of magnitude higher throughput than any other reliable messaging system on the market. All Sonic ESB 7.0 services, including the new advanced Web services, can fully exploit this capability.

"Sonic ESB allows Tarrant County to deliver the right information to the right person at the right time, and is a core part of the county's SOA strategy," said Mark O'Neal, Integrated Justice Project Manager for Tarrant County, Texas, one of the fastest growing urban counties in the United States. "When you're supporting the criminal justice system, even occasional downtime isn't acceptable. From the start we recognized that Sonic was head and shoulders above the competition in terms of enterprise quality of service and reliability, and this carries into the way they've implemented these advanced Web services standards. The new Eclipse-based tools dramatically improve our productivity in developing and deploying services across the county."

"Sonic continues to stay on the forefront of the ESB market with Sonic ESB 7.0, delivering innovations that will dramatically improve the productivity of our SOA project teams," said Joe Evans, vice president at Sierra Systems, a leading business consulting and systems integration firm. "Our clients are asking for Web services solutions, but until now there hasn't been a product that provides an implementation ready to support true mission-critical deployments. Our partnership with Sonic enables us to deliver open, enterprise SOA solutions to joint clients."

Product Availability

Sonic ESB 7.0 will be generally available on May 1, 2006.

Go to www.sonicsoftware.com/esb7 for more information and product specifications.

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 operating company of Progress Software Corporation (Nasdaq: PRGS), a 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 Workbench, 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.