Gartner ranks Sonic Number one in ESB Market

Johannesburg — 26 Jun 2006 — Progress Software has announced that its Progress Sonic ESB product has been ranked first in the enterprise service bus (ESB) segment of Gartner Dataquest's latest report on the worldwide application integration and middleware (AIM) market. The report, "Market Share: AIM and Portal Software, Worldwide, 2005", published 9 June, provides market share results for the AIM market in seven worldwide regions.

Overall, the Gartner Dataquest report noted that the ESB market expanded more significantly in 2005 than any other AIM segment with 160.7% revenue growth. Revenue for Sonic ESB increased from $8.7 million in 2004 to $18.5 million in 2005, surpassing the market share of BEA and securing four times the market share of IBM.

According to the report: "The introduction of Web services and the resulting popularisation of SOA caused a major upheaval in this market. Before 2002, integration backbones were largely proprietary, and many application developers were unknowledgeable about SOA and event-driven design. During 2002 through 2004, a new type of middleware, ESBs, came to market to exploit Web-services standards and the growing interest in SOA."

"We introduced the world's first ESB product over four years ago and are proud to lead the market in product capability, market share and customer success," says Rick Parry, MD of Progress Software South Africa. "We intend to extend this lead with Sonic ESB 7.0, released in May this year. The new release streamlines the full SOA project lifecycle in complex, distributed environments through a new Eclipse-based toolset, while providing a highly robust implementation of advanced Web services standards suitable for large-scale, mission-critical deployments - a powerful capability that no other vendor can provide today.

"We have been consistent in saying that delivery of SOA is dependent on a powerful enterprise backbone," adds Parry. "Increasingly the market is coming to agree with this assessment."

Over 300 customers

Over 300 of the world's most demanding enterprise and government customers rely on Sonic ESB as the backbone of their SOA implementations, including American Red Cross; AutoTrader; Bank of America; BAA Heathrow; City of Washington, DC; The Gillette Company; ProFlowers; Rotech Healthcare; Telecom Italia; and Tarrant County, TX.

Recently, BT selected Sonic ESB to embed within its integration appliance as part of BT Integrate, a managed integration service offering supporting SOA.

"Sonic ESB allows Tarrant County to deliver the right information to the right person at the right time, and is a core part of the county's SOA strategy," said Mark O'Neal, Integrated Justice Project Manager for Tarrant County, Texas, one of the fastest growing urban counties in the US. "When you're supporting the criminal justice system, even occasional downtime isn't acceptable. From the start we recognised that Sonic was head and shoulders above the competition in terms of enterprise quality of service and reliability, and this carries into the way they've implemented these advanced Web services standards. The new Eclipse-based tools dramatically improve our productivity in developing and deploying services across the county."

About Progress Software South Africa

Progress Software South Africa is a subsidiary of US-based Progress Software Corporation, the world leader in the embedded database market. The company provides the underlying software technology and services required for successfully developing, deploying, integrating, and managing e-business solutions. Progress actively pursues innovative technologies and new business opportunities that allow companies to make an effective transition to true e-business environments. Progress's OpenEdge platform enables its partners to deliver lowest cost-of-ownership applications that are rapidly implemented and easily integrated within and across the extended enterprise. The company's extensive partner base includes more than 2 000 application partners and application service providers who supply more than $5 billion in Progress-based applications and services annually. Over 50 000 organisations across 100 countries — including 70% of the Fortune 100 — rely on Progress technology.

Press Contacts: