Progress Software has acquired privately held Actional Corporation for $32 million. Actional provides Web services management (WSM) software for visibility and run-time governance of distributed IT systems in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Actional will become part of Sonic Software, the inventor and provider of the enterprise service bus, and an operating unit of Progress Software.
The acquisition creates the dominant SOA infrastructure solution in today`s rapidly expanding SOA market, according to Rick Parry, MD of Progress Software South Africa. "Large organisations making the transition to SOA can benefit from Actional`s products, whether they are initiating their first project, or have fully deployed a large-scale SOA production environment," Parry says.
"Actional`s SOA visibility and run-time governance ensure alignment between IT and business, by providing real-time monitoring and analysis of business processes, and by employing security and policies to manage and optimise any enterprise SOA implementation. Actional`s technology provides these capabilities with low overheads and minimal impact on system performance."
Parry adds that the pairing of Sonic`s SOA Suite and Actional`s products - each an established, SOA product line in its own right - establishes Sonic as the market`s leading provider of platform-independent, enterprise-grade SOA infrastructure software.
"Sonic has successfully established Sonic ESB as the preferred platform to connect, mediate and orchestrate services in an enterprise SOA environment."
Actional`s platform-agnostic approach to SOA visibility and run-time governance supports SOA environments using enterprise service buses (ESBs), application servers, or other technologies. The Actional and Sonic products can be used independently of one another, or combined to support the entire SOA lifecycle from service definition and deployment, to process definition and staging, to runtime visibility and real-time optimisation.
"Like Sonic, Actional has been an innovator and pioneer of SOA," says Parry. "Now that most companies acknowledge the business agility and operational efficiency benefits of SOA, we see that there are many organisations with clear needs for Web services management. A thorough analysis of the WSM market revealed that Actional had far and away the most advanced feature set as well as the most robust, scalable and high performance WSM infrastructure.
"ESB and WSM complement each other perfectly," Parry says. "Sonic`s SOA Suite offerings provide infrastructure for end-to-end, distributed execution of business processes across SOA implementations. Actional WSM technologies add system and process-level visibility as well as policy enforcement to Sonic`s product mix, allowing Sonic to address a much wider range of customer needs as they implement their SOA strategies."
"Progress has created an impressive portfolio of sophisticated and robust SOA technologies," says Tom Ryan, CEO of Actional. "Our proven product line delivers the missing ingredient: the management and visibility to ensure that every SOA project, no matter what technologies are used, is a successful one."
In addition to the Sonic and Actional product lines, Progress Software provides an event stream processing (ESP) platform, and expects to provide mainframe SOA integration after the completion of the pending acquisition of NEON Systems. ESP optimises business process execution within an SOA environment by analysing events in real-time and initiating instantaneous automated action based on business-defined rules. NEON`s Shadow RTE products allow enterprises to incorporate mainframe applications - where many mission-critical enterprise transactions run - directly within their SOA environments, with full security and operational robustness.
Share
Editorial contacts