I Love All My Children Equally, Though Differently

Since I know many people google me and read this blog, let me start by saying that my children are written in Java, C#, and C++.

Actional can police every service platform out there... but for some, we add functionality using our Agent technology. Partnerships enable us to do some really awesome things. And, last year, our partner team was unbelievable in the amount of solid and demonstrable partnerships they brought to market. (Note to self, update our partner page!)

One of the children we delivered last year was our Agent for Lombardi Teamworks. I'm super excited about the product, it's a great demonstration of the value Actional delivers. It's also a great example of how Actional is separate and distinct from Sonic here at Progress. We (Actional) work with Sonic and Sonic's BPEL Server, but we also work with Lombardi.

Yeah, that's right, I think of Sonic as a partner. They are. They just also happen to be our cousin. It was always the intent to keep Actional separate and distinct to promote our heterogeneous service management and security solution. But, admittedly, we didn't always telegraph that so clearly to the market. I even had a Sonic Software business card at one point - not exactly the way to give the market a comfy sense that we'll continue to partner strongly. Hopefully, that misconception is behind us in the distant past.

As our "brother from another mother," we have really great relationships with the Sonic engineering team. I think they've done some great stuff but... I remain agnostic. I mean, I hope that if you buy an ESB, you buys theirs. But if you don't, I still want you to use Actional with IBM's or BEA's or Oracle's or TIBCO's.

SOA What? Tuesday January 22nd, you all have the opportunity to talk to some of the great folks at Sonic that have been working with Actional's "stuff" since the acquisition two years ago.

I want to encourage you all to sign up and spend an hour with them.

You will get to meet:

• Kim Palko, Sr. Product Manager of Sonic Products. Kim's responsible for Sonic ESB, Sonic Workbench, and the Sonic Deployment Manager (talk about cool software, SDM rocks!).
• Mahesh Nair, Software Architect for Sonic ESB. Mahesh is "the guy" that lead Actional/ESB integration. It's a real opportunity to get to meet him Tuesday.
• Frank Beusenberg, Sr. Applied Technologist, EMEA. Our Applied Technologists "translate" the products into real-world situations and deliver best practices to our customers. Frank has tons of customer experience across EMEA and is responsible for making Sonic ESB customers using Actional successful.

They're going to show a demo of Actional and Sonic working together and show you how they configured it. This is a technical session, and a real opportunity to see it, without being sold! And, if you like it, we'll hook you up with a 30-day evaluation of Actional to try in your environment.

[Warning, sales pitch ahead...]

Remember, Actional watches/polices every single message in a production environment without impacting performance. We'll scale to manage over 1,000 nodes using a single management server, and we'll do it without breaking a sweat (or your CPU - we use less than 2% of the CPU on the managed node). I know, it sounds like I'm lying. Register, and see how we do it!