Today, Software AG announced the strategic OEM partnership between our two companies. What makes this especially noteworthy is that, up until now, if someone wanted to buy full-lifecycle SOA governance, they only had two choices:
- Buy all the pieces, design and runtime, from one vendor (knowing that one or the other was weak - since no vendor had even a half decent offering on both sides of the fence).
- Buy market leading components - but have to buy them from different vendors
This partnership will allow customers to buy full-lifecycle SOA governance from one vendor, without having to compromise.
One other important note is that Actional's direct competitors have tried to create FUD in the market by claiming that Actional is tightly tied with Sonic. Of course we do work well with Sonic, but a very large percentage of Actional customers use us with platforms such as BEA, TIBCO, IBM, Microsoft, JBoss, and others - no Sonic in sight. Our competitors certainly liked to paint a picture that Actional was "Sonic centric" even though this was far from the truth.
To have a successful SOA management and runtime governance offering:
- Your products need to be vendor neutral - working equally well with the SOA infrastructure of many vendors.
- As many more organizations are scaling up their SOA initiatives - building mission critical applications that are service oriented - SOA management can't cause your applications to slow down, or cause you to lose transactions. It needs to be scalable and reliable.
These were two important factors in Software AG's selection, and this partnership clearly demonstrates Actional's leadership in these areas.