BT chooses Sonic for managed integration service

Johannesburg — 30 May 2006 — Sonic Software, inventor and provider of the enterprise service bus (ESB), and an operating unit of Progress Software, has forged a relationship with BT, one of the world's largest providers of communications services, that enables BT to embed Sonic ESB in its integration appliance as part of BT Integrate, a managed integration service offering supporting service-oriented architectures (SOAs).

"BT is one of the most trusted and respected companies in the world," says Rick Parry, MD of Progress Software South Africa. "By choosing the Sonic ESB, BT will deliver to its customers a service built on the most reliable ESB on the market. BT also gains access to Sonic's comprehensive SOA infrastructure products as the needs of their customers evolve. The BT Integrate offering presents SOA as more approachable for a broad range of customers that might otherwise delay their SOA adoption."

Stefan van Overtveldt, VP and head of practice, BT IT Transformation, says: "BT Integrate offers our customers greater business agility, reduces integration management complexity and is faster to deploy than alternative approaches. Over the last 12 months we have worked closely with Sonic Software to deliver a shared vision, choosing it for its functionality, high availability capabilities and line-up of SOA infrastructure products. We have developed BT Integrate in response to customer demands for scalable and affordable application integration that can be used to meet the challenges of dispersed organisations - we believe that BT Integrate will disrupt and challenge the existing integration market."

The Sonic ESB provides the embedded integration engine for BT Integrate, supporting robust, scalable and highly reliable connections across distributed networks of computing services. With the Sonic ESB, remotely deployed services can be dynamically reconfigured on-the-fly from a single consol. Sonic Software was selected as the SOA infrastructure partner for BT following a thorough and intensive technical evaluation.

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.

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