Package used for SOA deployment Focusing on availability of application services, Sonic Software on Tuesday announced it is shipping Sonic Business Integration Suite 5.5, which utilizes the company’s “Continuous Availability Architecture” in development of service-oriented architectures.The availability architecture is intended to reduce time required for the communications infrastructure of the company’s enterprise service bus (ESB) to resume operations after hardware, software or network failures. It also ensures that transactions are not lost or rolled back. Sonic’s suite provides for an SOA integration platform.Sonic’s availability architecture is incorporated into the communications layer of the products contained in the suite, said Gordon Van Huizen, CTO at Sonic. “The importance [of the architecture] is that business transactions don’t fail and don’t go into recovery state if you lose server hardware or communication paths,’ Van Huizen said. SOAs are event-driven and it is critical that events not be lost, he said. A secondary server must be deployed with Continuous Availability Architecture to provide for redundancy, Van Huizen said.An analyst said the upgraded messaging system in the suite, enabled through the availability architecture, would be of interest to some high-end customers. “What [Sonic officials] did was they just put the new messaging system in there,” said Shawn Willett, principal analyst at Current Analysis. “I think everything else is pretty much the same.”Sonic, Willett said, was the first vendor out with a product called an ESB. The company overall offers a pretty complete suite and a good messaging system, he added. Offerings in the suite are not bundled together. The Sonic suite features:– ESB, a service bus offering for integrating applications across an enterprise. It is priced beginning at $10,000 per CPU.– Orchestration Server, to extend the intelligent routing of the ESB for modeling and management of automated business processes. New in this product is support of human interaction in the automation of business processes, such as being able to take specific action should a product ordered be out of stock. The software costs $12,500 per CPU. – XML Server, for XML processing and storage and query services for integration projects enabled by the ESB. It is priced at $10,000 per CPU.– Integration Workbench, a developer workbench for exposing applications, developing services and orchestrating business processes prior to deployment. Pricing is $3,750 per developer.– Adapters for Sonic ESB, which enable service-based interactions for more than 250 types of applications and systems, including prepackaged applications from SAP and PeopleSoft. Sonic did not provide pricing for the adapters. Software DevelopmentApplication IntegrationTechnology Industry