Dueling Business Process Management Vendors Up Ante

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Two vendors in the business process management suite space are slugging it
out this week with new products that help companies integrate and arrange
business applications in a service-oriented architecture (SOA).

Progress Software (Quote) unveiled its latest
enterprise service bus (define) software and a brand new BPEL
(define)&nsp;BSP server to choreograph services in the ESB. Rival Ultimus
introduced its new Adaptive BPM Suite.

BPM software is designed to help businesses tailor applications and software
infrastructure so that they improve the company’s business processes. Part
of the SOA (define) distributed computing fabric, BPM software is a
relative niche market that’s expected to vault the $1 billion barrier as newfangled Web
services (define) become the norm.

Hub Vandervoort, CTO of the Enterprise Infrastructure Division at Progress,
said Sonic ESB 7.5 and Sonic BPEL Server are the first major products to
support the recently adopted WS-BPEL 2.0 standard.

Vandervoort acknowledged that while Sonic was beat to the market by several
other BPEL servers, Progress feels Sonic BPEL Server is superior because it
is based on WS-BPEL 2.0, which he said better serves the market than WS-BPEL
1.0 and 1.1 versions.

“We thought it was inferior to what our customers most basic requirements
were so we thought it would be academic to ship a product that wouldn’t do
any good to our customers,” Vandervoort said.

Customers may use the new Sonic BPEL Server, which adds service
orchestration to the intelligent routing capabilities of Sonic ESB, to
compose services and correlate events in the Sonic ESB automatically and
without hand coding.

Meanwhile the latest Sonic ESB, version 7.5, has been enhanced to work with
the Actional SOA management software the company purchased last year, as well as with Progress DataXtend Semantic Integrator (SI)
software.

With the Actional assets, Sonic ESB 7.5 now affords IT managers greater
control of all activities across the ESB the entire SOA infrastructure with
which it connects. The Actional software automatically detects service
level violations and pinpoints their root causes for fixes.

Sonic ESB 7.5 also features development and runtime integration with
DataXtend SI, which uses common Eclipse-based tooling to deploy semantic
services in ESB containers.

Built on Microsoft Office System 2007, Ultimus’ new Adaptive BPM Suite,
version 8, is designed to let business managers make business process
changes without having to code anything. The new software includes a
interactive business activity monitoring, or iBAM.

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