Oracle Makes the Right Choice for their Customers

As I write this, I wonder if Joe will wonder why one of his (very loyal, and loved by many) employees (me) would promote Oracle on the company blog! Hear me out Joe... this is good news, for us, and for Oracle (and BEA) customers.

Just back from vacation (I know, y'all missed me), and adjusting to the market's reaction to our acquisitions of IONA and Mindreef, and I came across this bit...

Oracle drops Amberpoint for SOA Management.

I mean, it's on the Internet, so it must be true, right?

I can't say this is a surprise, except that I am surprised that they are correcting their mistaken relationship in the first place. I mean, look at the history of Amberpoint's partners once they make the time to find out about Progress® Actional®:

1. Microsoft. Amberpoint's got a great relationship with them, and certainly much better than we do since the Progress acquisition. But... Microsoft has always viewed them as a tool vendor, shipping Amberpoint Express with Visual Studio. A testing tool for developers that doesn't integrate seamlessly with their enterprise offerings. And, we continue to enhance our support for .NET SOA infrastructure, including more protocol support for Microsoft protocols (like ADO.NET and WCF) than any other SOA management vendor.
2. Progress. Progress originally had a "best practice" offering with Amberpoint, until Hub met Dan. Hub, one of Progress' technical gods, got it immediately, and not only did they drop Amberpoint, they acquired us!
3. IONA. Our Actional customers won't talk in public but not only have we been partnering with IONA (with an Actional Agent for Artix ESB), but we've been replacing Amberpoint in several accounts because of the impact they have on production performance and scalability. Oh, and it turns out that Amberpoint modifies one telco's messages in order to track them end-to-end... a big no-no.
4. Software AG. A relationship growing quite well, combining Software AG's registry and repository solution with Actional's SOA management and security offerings. Like chocolate ice cream and whipped cream - it's ecstasy.

And, there are many others, large and small.

By the way, with respect to Oracle/BEA, we support Oracle Application Server and WebLogic Server, and BEA Aqualogic Enterprise Repository, and have for some time.

SOA What? I know the above is a bit sales-y but it's an important part of who we are. And, when customers make a decision to work with a vendor like Progress Actional, they want to know they're in good company and that we'll work with the rest of the enterprise tools already in place. We are, we will, and we'll do it in a way that easy, fast, and scalable. I promise.