Jason Stamper posted recently about Progress and the organization changes "to make its Sonic division less autonomous." Read his post.
So why would the corporation make such a decision? I think it is eminently clear. Look at how acquisitive the traditional platform suppliers have become in recent years: IBM, SAP, BEA, Oracle. What have they acquired? Technologies like Progress has in Sonic's ESB, the Apama event processing product, Actional's SOA management. Why? Because those market spaces are incredibly exciting, growing rapidly, and threaten the franchises IBM, SAP, BEA and Oracle (among others) have built over the past decade(s).
As a result, Progress has elected to assemble a portfolio of products to expand the value proposition we can bring to customers and prospects -- and the affinities across the Sonic, Actional and Apama product lines are obvious -- even to industry analysts (;-). I recently published a white paper -- The Right Infrastructure for SOA, which goes into greater detail.
But unlike the millstone-necklace-laden platform vendors, we have chosen not to pour more wet concrete around our installed base footprint. We take a different approach deliberately because we believe each of our products should be able to stand and deliver value on its own—be it our industry-leading ESB, Actional for SOA visibility and management, Apama for complex event processing or for dealing with the challenges disparate data models in an SOA environment. Not only do we believe it, but we can prove it. Actional is deployed as often along side competitors' ESBs or application servers as our own; IBM Global Services endorses SI for use in telecom integration; and Sonic is often called upon to connect disparate platform stacks. It’s this fierce product independence that frees us from protecting a franchise.
That said, customers, especially large enterprise customers, need to buy from a vendor they can trust and one that’s not going anywhere – Progress has been in business for 25 years and demonstrates rock-solid performance year after year. While it’s not always easy to convince customers (or the press) that we’re committed to the independence (yet interoperability) of our product lines—it’s certainly difficult to imagine a vendor making a bigger commitment to product autonomy in this age of the super-size-me platform.
SOA What? Customers and prospects have lots of vendor choices for SOA infrastructure. We believe there is an important difference in our approach from those of the gargantuan platform vendors' offerings. We believe the platform vendors are uniquely unqualified to address the mediation, management and communication issues that occur amongst and between platform environments in your SOA.