Web services infrastructure vendor Sonic Software this week will introduce its SOA Suite, which includes tools designed to make it easier for corporations to integrate current databases with Web services and to share resources with partners.
The company is launching Collaboration Server 6.1, which lets users extend Sonic Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), a Web services-based middleware integration engine, to integrate with partners’ networks. Database Service, an addition to ESB that lets the middleware talk directly to database engines, is also new.
The two new pieces are being bundled with ESB and Sonic’s Orchestration and XML servers to create SOA Suite 6.1, formerly called Sonic Business Integration Suite.
The intent is to supply corporate users with a backbone for a service-oriented architecture (SOA ) that stretches throughout an organization and across network boundaries. Sonic’s focus is on tying computing resources, such as databases, into a Web services model that is fueled by events on the network, such as a transaction, with the ESB integration platform as the common layer for executing those events.
“Sonic is adding lots of usability improvements, database improvements, and a common services invocation layer,” says Shawn Willett, principal analyst with Current Analysis. “People do have a lot of services now and they are thinking about some of the limitations of SOAs.” Willett says those limitations center on immature standards for features such as guaranteed messaging and security, and also building support for events and transactions. “With the database, it is not event-driven, it is query-driven. How do you deal with that to create an event? How do you put in an event layer, transactional layer?” Willett asks.
Sonic is answering the database question with its Database Service, which supports connection to Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase, Informix and DB2 databases.
Sonic is using drivers it acquired when its parent company, Progress Software, bought DataDirect Technologies last year. The drivers support extraction of metadata and schema from the database.
“The service can become an event generator that can monitor state in a database and generate events based on what occurs,” says Gordon Van Huizen, CTO of Sonic.
The Collaboration Server supports both business-to-business and Web services protocols, which includes RosettaNet and ebXML , and file transfer or mail-based interfaces. The server also lets corporations separate partner business processes from internal business processes.
Sonic ESB, which competes with products from Cape Clear, Fiorano Software, IBM, Iona, SeeBeyond Technology, WebMethods and others, runs on Windows, HP-UX, IBM AIX, Red Hat Linux and Sun Solaris. The SOA Suite costs $35,000 per CPU. The Database Service costs $15,000 per CPU, and the Collaboration Server costs $35,000 per CPU.
