Agility. Efficiency. Operational Awareness.

A service-oriented architecture (SOA) leverages your existing IT investments and promotes a high level of operational awareness, refashioning them as modular, standards-based services that can be easily reused and integrated with other technology. Among other things, a robust SOA infrastructure promises to:

• Improve business agility;
• Make business services more broadly available and reusable;
• Eliminate boundaries between business functions. 
  
  

Designing a service-oriented architecture often comes with the requirement that organizations deploy another layer of middleware via yet another IT stack. Unfortunately, the costs of doing so often outweigh the sought-after benefits promised by SOA. In addition to the upfront costs of purchasing and deploying the middleware, the ongoing hardware and maintenance costs can monopolize valuable resources and limit productivity. Such complex options require expensive servers and create vendor lock-in—ending this hold middleware has on SOA infrastructure is critical to SOA success.

Progress is one of the first and only enterprise software vendors to take this approach to solve service-oriented architecture challenges. A number of our Global 2000 customers have validated this approach by deploying a combination of our fully-integrated open source and commercial solutions to more effectively meet their unique SOA requirements in a more affordable way.

• Learn About Next-generation SOA

Progress Software is an industry leader in providing the technology that powers SOA. In 2008 we introduced the industry's first enterprise service bus (ESB), Progress® Sonic® ESB, and since it's inception, Forrester Research has named Sonic ESB as a leader in the ESB market. Today, we continue to enhance our products and solutions to help our customers achieve operational responsiveness.

Click to enlarge image.

Through Responsive Business Integration (RBI) we've combined best-of-breed modular products that help bring a next generation solution to enterprise integration. RBI helps: Enable faster response to business change Close the gap between business needs and IT delivery Deliver Information in the right format, at the right time With RBI you'll gain comprehensive insight into your business transactions, and you'll understand how events reveal opportunities, threats or inefficiencies so that you can take action.

	British Airways requires a complex business infrastructure and uses the Progress portfolio of SOA solutions, including Progress® Sonic® ESB, Progress® Actional® SOA Management and Progress® DataXtend® Semantic Integrator (SI), as a key part of its travel program to upgrade its IT systems.
	Progress solutions have allowed One.Tel to improve customer service through a browser-based customer support system and a portal that allows telecommunications customers to access their account and billing information online.
	Progress solution gives SEB Estonia visibility across all of its transaction systems, allowing the bank to detect potentially fraudulent behavior in real time—and verify it in minutes. Using our application integration platform SEB Estonia has slashed verification time from five hours to five-to-ten minutes.
	Volvo is a world leader in safety and innovation but equally important is its customer support and service. Volvo turned to a dealer management system (DMS) based on Progress® OpenEdge® that uses Sonic ESB to more efficiently interoperate with centralized business applications. The result... improved customer service -  98% of parts ordered are delivered overnight.