As law enforcement and prosecution agencies across America seek better ways to share information on criminals and case files, it becomes apparent that there needs to be a faster way to reach the truth. For Tarrant County, Texas, real-time availability of information is crucial to expediting and improving its criminal justice system. With 41 incorporated communities and more than one million citizens, Tarrant County is the one of the fastest growing urban counties. But also growing are the difficulties, expense, and latency of circulating paper case files and sharing electronic information among county entities. Tarrant Country wanted real-time access. Being able to move beyond old-school methods and workarounds for information retrieval to a comprehensive, real-time justice search-and-find engine was just what Tarrant County wanted. After researching technologies and potential vendors, their IT team selected a service-oriented architecture (SOA) framework from Progress Software. Their enterprise service bus, Progress Sonic ESB provides a federated approach to alignment and automation of critical data applications for greater visibility and flexibility across distributed environments. Sonic ESB simplifies and mediates connectivity of existing and new applications. With Sonic ESB now a significant part of the enterprise architecture, Tarrant County is able to facilitate its ambitious integrated justice program and enable the IT department to operate an information utility service. Sonic ESB simplifies and mediates connectivity of existing and new applications - which function independently on existing platforms but gain full participation in the bus topology - to orchestrate and control end-to-end business processes, without recoding requirements. The result is immediate, seamless, cost-effective integration and communication. Read the Progress Software case study.