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Software AG unveils innovative, open standard suite to drive SOA


Johannesburg, 20 Mar 2006

Software AG has launched crossvision, an industrial-strength service-oriented architecture (SOA) that allows businesses - through its unique approach to governing and controlling services - to rapidly and cost-effectively leverage their existing assets and create new processes.

Unveiled to the South African market on 16 March, the crossvision SOA suite is interoperable and supports different application servers, portal servers and messaging platforms, such as IBM's WebSphere, BEA's Weblogic and JBoss.

Its core strengths include:

* SOA management and governance: crossvision provides management and governance capabilities critical to the success of SOA, giving organisations the transparency and control needed to quickly achieve business objectives.
* Composite applications: to rapidly compose new business applications based on existing systems, crossvision supports advanced AJAX technologies and easy composition of rich media user interfaces.
* Legacy modernisation: By leveraging, rather than replacing, an existing IT landscape, crossvision reduces risk, expense and downtime so that organisations can achieve rapid return on investment. All systems are treated as first class citizens of the SOA, including standard applications, legacy systems, best-of-breed and home-grown systems.
* Unification of BPM and SOA: crossvision drives a process-centric approach to SOA by incorporating powerful business process management that enables new business processes - from modelling through automation and management to process optimisation.

In South Africa to attend the launch and participate in Software AG South Africa's customer 'bootcamp', a one-and-a-half day educational programme designed to allow potential customers to interact with the suite, Software AG senior director product management for XMLi, Dr Stefan Ried, said the rapid realisation of customers' business visions is the core concept behind the new SOA suite.

The key, however, to turning these visions into realities is to deliver strong products for leveraging SOA, BPM and existing systems across the organisation, combined with effective and experienced SOA consultancy, he said.

"crossvision allows a company to synchronise business and IT and enable business agility while leveraging its existing infrastructure thanks to six powerful complementary components that adapt to an organisation's requirements, exactly matching their specific mission-critical needs.

"These are crossvision Application Composer, crossvision Business Process Manager, crossvision Information Integrator, crossvision Service Orchestrator, crossvision Legacy Integrator and CentraSite.

"crossvision Application Composer rapidly composes new business applications out of existing services based on models rather than code. Application Composer utilises advanced technologies and standards such as AJAX and BPEL.

"crossvision Business Process Manager models and coordinates the flow of enterprise-wide business processes while crossvision Information Integrator combines data from different systems into a single user-friendly view.

"crossvision Service Orchestrator facilitates the orchestration of high value business services and crossvision Legacy Integrator - creates new services and value from existing systems without rip and replace.

"The backbone of crossvision is CentraSite, a SOA registry and repository that manages all SOA assets such as business services, policies and processes. It supports open standards and customisable metadata - enabling crossvision to support any SOA artefacts through a one-time mapping, one-time definition process," Dr Ried said.

Software AG South Africa director, Devon Dalbock added: "In conjunction with crossvision, Software AG is helping companies meet the challenges of planning and implementing an SOA strategy through its recently announced SOA Competency Center which offers assessments, best practices, methodologies, templates and additional elements focused specifically on the SOA lifecycle.

"crossvision takes full account of the fact that competitive pressures require IT departments to support business in facing the growing market complexity and compliance requirements. Proof of local business' desire to explore the solution is the fact that our customer 'boot camp' course was fully subscribed within four days. Further events will be scheduled shortly to cater for the market demand.

"crossvision is immediately available on a restricted shipment basis, with general availability planned for the second quarter of 2006. It comes with an innovative modular licensing model that allows customers to choose the suite components that best meet their needs, providing maximum flexibility and optimal return on investment," Dalbock said.

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Editorial contacts

Cathy van Zyl
C-Cubed Communications
(021) 852 7198
Devon Dalbock
Software AG
(011) 575 3000