Sonic Software has released Sonic ESB(tm) 5.5 which makes it possible for companies to build an event-driven, service-oriented architecture (SOA) that can adapt to ever-changing business requirements.
Sonic ESB 5.5 incorporates Sonic Continuous Availability Architecture(tm) (CAA) to deliver highly available communications between applications in an enterprise SOA.
Sonic Continuous Availability Architecture dramatically reduces the time required for the communications infrastructure of the ESB to resume operations seamlessly after hardware, software or network failures, and guarantees that transactions are not lost or rolled back, a spokesman for Sonic said. Key capabilities include hot failover to ensure the integrity of in-process transactions; and an ‘out-of-the-box’ software-based configuration, eliminating the need to configure and deploy specialized hardware, the company said.
“Continuous availability is the latest in a series of critical capabilities that enterprise-grade ESBs must provide,” said Gordon Van Huizen, CTO of Sonic Software. “As the market embraces ESBs as the future of integration, this release extends our advantage, and further refines our definition of best-of-breed ESBs.”
“A plain ESB is sufficient for implementing a new, basic SOA or event-driven application, but it does not incorporate all of the features that are helpful in more-sophisticated applications or in application integration scenarios,” said Roy Schulte, vice president and research fellow at Gartner, Inc.
“Architects must examine ESB and integration suite architecture at a detailed level to be able to detect the subtle but important differences in product strengths and limitations,” Schulte explained.
Since Sonic Software delivered the first ESB to market in March 2002, the technology and term have gained widespread adoption across enterprise IT shops and the software industry alike, the company said.
Since then, the basic building blocks of an ESB have become fairly well established: messaging; Web services; intelligent routing; and data transformation, the company explained. Though necessary, these basic capabilities are not sufficient to fully support enterprise service-oriented architecture deployments in practice, Sonic said.