Stories about: Progress Software

Tibco is releasing what it calls a major update to its complex-event processing (CEP) software on Monday, not long after its rival IBM laid out an ambitious road map for its own offerings in the space.

The SOA concept -- developing a software architecture based on service components that can be mixed and matched as needed to reduce development time and increase application deployment flexibility -- is only a few years old, but the providers of SOA-supporting infrastructure are fast consolidating. Oracle captured the headlines with its acquisition of BEA Systems this spring, and Progress Software recently bought Iona Technologies.

Progress Software is buying fellow SOA (service oriented architecture) infrastructure vendor Iona Technologies for about US$162 million, or $106 million net of cash and marketable securities.

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At its Impact conference in the US Monday, IBM announced an event-driven extension to its WebSphere platform for managing services in an SOA environment. Most SOA platforms have focused on centrally orchestrating services triggered by a process need, such as handling a customer lookup when a salesperson processes an order. But most SOA platforms have not been engineered to handle complex events, in which a pattern of activities -- both random and scheduled -- should trigger a set of services. These complex events are more common in high-transaction environments.

Progress Software is launching its Progress Actional 7.1 SOA management platform Monday, featuring visibility across business processes and into related services and IT infrastructure.

The concept of an SOA "suite" may seem antithetical to those who were counting on SOA to free us from the tyranny of vendor lock-in, but there's an upside to this development. First, today's ESB (enterprise service bus) suites are much more capable than the early point solutions. Second, when you're dropping six figures on a paradigm shift, you want to know someone has your back at every layer of the services stack.

Australia's oldest Ford dealership, Harrigan Ford, is set to achieve savings of $400,000 in the first year of implementing a Revolution Dealer Management System (DMS).

Service-oriented architecture promises many positives: resource reuse, application integration, business agility and infrastructure flexibility, among others. But never do SOA proponents claim ease of management as one of the technology's glories.

The possible acquisition of BEA Systems by Oracle will put the database vendor on par with IBM in the application infrastructure space, but there still is room for the remaining independent middleware vendors, analysts said.

Software-as-a-service may have come into the enterprise through "the bathroom window," but it's definitely becoming part of the mainstream, says SAAS expert Mike West, vice president at Saugatuck Technology Inc., a boutique management consulting and subscription research company focused on disruptive technologies.