A Different View of Progress

A fish out of water – that’s what I should have been feeling like when I went to Progress Software’s analyst day in Boston last week. And yet, I felt strangely at home. Progress offers a broad collection of middleware technologies, generally, including databases, data translation, enterprise service bus, SOA management, and the like. Not stuff you’d expect a bit-head like me to be interested in. But then again I’m really fascinated by this, because, ultimately, it’s what our networks are entrusted to deliver. Progress executives did a great job of laying out their focus – improving business velocity via their Business Acceleration Architecture. Sounds like very high level stuff for the operations audience, but underneath that they have a very complete story about how their technology can help all of the many aspects of automating business process Some of the more intriguing elements for me were their Actional and Apama products. While they clearly come at the problem space of application service integrity from the application angle, they are doing some cool stuff. For instance, the Actional product understands and tracks application flows, including every process transaction, along with contextual data details. It also understands SOA components and which ones are in use and active for any particular multi-step process. This is one of the areas that so many ops teams have a healthy concern about (especially dynamic, distributed SOA components that might be called up unexpectedly from remote data centers, exacting huge latency penalties in the process) but little if any direct visibility into. And the Apama product is all about Complex Event Processing (CEP). In describing CEP, the Progress folks used terms like “accepting thousands of events per second” and “correlation for understanding root issues.” To me, that sounded an awful lot like what event management systems were built to do. In fact, IBM has also been making statements in this area, built in large part around the Tivoli Netcool engine. But it turns out that this really isn’t about the network/systems type of event management, which is essentially about managing exceptions – it’s really more about data mining of process status data that can be sifted through to find subtle issues which indicate non-optimal efficiencies. That said, a Progress customer advocate from a big Euro telco proceeded to discuss how they had deployed Apama to correlate multiple event data feeds, applying it more along the lines of my original thinking. The Euro customer was also using Progress’s Sonic ESB, and gave them the ultimate complement – “It just works.” In the end, that’s all IT shops are really asking for. They just want this technology to work. No long, drawn out integration battles, trying to fit square technology into a round operations hole. No stability issues. No requests for help that are met with roadmap promises. If Progess can get someone to pay them this complement, then they are definitely doing some things right….