Dave Chappell, an enterprise service bus (ESB) guru who quite literally wrote the book on ESBs, has jumped ship from the Sonic Software division of Progress Software and turned up as a VP & chief technologist at Oracle. I wonder why…
Chappell is considered one of the leading lights on ESBs, and his book, aptly titled Enterprise Service Bus, was published by O’Reilly back in 2004. I’ve met him a few times and he’s a straight-talking, serious kind of interviewee who is not afraid to point out the failings of rival firms’ approaches.
I wonder if this move has anything to do with the fact that – as I reported in January this year – Progress seems to be making moves to make its Sonic division less autonomous, bringing it more in line with its other divisions under an umbrella it calls the Enterprise Infrastructure Division.
As Progress SVP for corporate development and strategy, Jeff Stamen, told me in January, Sonic was initially set up as a separate subsidiary in order to give it the feel of a start-up and so enable it to attract bright staff to work on Sonic’s ESB products, a new area for Progress at that time.
But since then as SOA principles have crystallized, the company has realized that it should bring together several products from its various divisions and subsidiaries, for instance the Sonic ESB, Actional SOA management and governance and DataXtend data integration products, under a new Enterprise Infrastructure Division banner. Sonic has become a brand name within that division.
More from my interview with Jeff Stamen here:
Progress Predicts Return of the 4GL
