Sonic beefs up integration suite

Sonic Software on Monday put the final piece of its Business Integration Suite in place, rolling out three products that add BPM (business process management), XML-based storage and processing, and an IDE to its existing ESB architecture.

The three new offerings include the Sonic XML Server, which company officials claim is the first storage and processing engine to be part and parcel of an integration platform; the Sonic Orchestration Server for business process management; and the Sonic Integration Workbench, which equips system architects with tools for modeling, testing, and deploying integration products.

The XML Server contains a number of auditing, logging, data staging, and aggregation features as well as business event capture and monitoring functions across the ESB. The product can take advantage of the existing XSLT and XQuery standards.

“With this offering we can start to address some of the nagging complaints about XML in terms of its lack of speed and performance that are bogging people down. It can break through some of those bottlenecks,” said Tim Dempsey, vice president of marketing at Sonic.

The XML Server was constructed to exploit the inherent capabilities of the ESB, which itself is intended for a distributed enterprise that is lightweight yet can support “thousands of application end points,” according to Dempsey.

The New Orchestration Server, also sculpted for distributed enterprises, is intended to extend the reach of business processes in that it allows users to manage those business processes that exist out on the periphery of the enterprise.

“The ESB innately supports itinerary business process flow, and so that fits well with Orchestration Server’s ability to let you carry out full-featured business process orchestration,” Dempsey said.

The Integration Workbench, which contains all the tools from the company’s Stylus Studio toolkit, focuses strictly on code development and supports the application integration capabilities of the company’s ESB.

Expected to compete directly with integration tools and platforms, such as IBM’s MQSeries line and Tibco’s Rendezvous, the new products will be targeted primarily at users in the financial services, telecommunications, and retail industries, company officials said.

The Orchestration Server is priced at $10,000 per processor, as is the XML Server. The Workbench product costs $3,750 per developer and includes the Stylus Studio-based visual tools for designing and testing integration environments.

The products are available for downloading immediately at http://www.sonicsoftware.com.