Progress SVP for corporate development and strategy, Jeff Stamen, told us that 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 Enterprise Service Bus products, a new area for Progress at that time.
But since then as service oriented architecture, 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 becomes a brand name within that division.
Another spokesperson for Progress confirmed the news, adding that while Sonic Software is currently still legally a wholly owned subsidiary of Progress, We’re in the process of transitioning the mechanical aspects of corporate legal structure and that takes time.
The firm’s Jeff Stamen said that it will not market an SOA suite despite having many of the pieces, because, We don’t want to make people buy an entire platform. They can choose the pieces they want. We’re not forcing a holistic view.
Asked whether each of the products within the new Enterprise Infrastructure Division are integrated and share the same development and configuration tools, Stamen said: We are incrementally getting there, and since they all use Eclipse as the development tooling they are getting very close to one another.
Stamen said that each has different run-time management interfaces but argued that these tend to be used by people with different roles in the enterprise anyway.
Stamen conceded that Progress does not own all of the pieces required for SOA: nobody has everything, he said. For instance the company uses the third party Systinet product as its registry and repository offering. Systinet was recently acquired by Mercury Interactive, itself being bought by HP, but Stamen said that has not had a negative impact on the Systinet relationship thus far.
Progress has made a series of acquisitions recently, including Actional (SOA management), Neon Systems (mainframe connectivity and modernization), EasyAsk (context-sensitive search for intranets and extranets), Pantero (data transformation and validation) and Apama (event stream processing). Stamen said that there may well be more acquisitions during 2007, but that they are likely to be at a slower rate.
