If One is Good, Five Must Be Great!

Rob Hailstone, an analyst over at The Butler Group, just wrote an article talking about our IONA acquisition. It's one of the better articles I've read, and it shows that he knows quite a bit about IONA's products and the overall market.

He makes two points in relation to Progress® Actional® which I'd like to address. He suggests that IONA partners with Amberpoint which will have a conflict with our Actional products. Then he goes on to say:

"Progress partners with the HP Systinet registry/repository for service and metadata management, but Iona has its own registry/repository within the Artix suite."

Well, the Amberpoint issue has been addressed below both by Dan and myself. But, I'd like to clarify the Actional registry/repository positioning for Rob's audience, since I couldn't comment directly on Rob's post.

Actional currently supports registry/repository integration with:

1. Standard UDDI registries
2. HP Systinet (and the Governance Interoperability Framework)
3. Software AG
4. Fujitsu
5. BEA AquaLogic Registry Repository

Each of these is currently supported and available.

SOA What? This actually speaks quite well to the Progress SOA "portfolio" concept (in contrast to "stack" vendor solutions). The idea behind our SOA portfolio is that customers are free to choose bits and pieces that work for them, and be assured that the bits they choose work well with the rest of their enterprise infrastructure choices. Actional supports Sonic ESB and SonicMQ, as well as IONA Artix and other ESB solutions. Customers have a choice, and our partner organization works very hard to make sure that we have the relationships to back-up product integrations we deliver to the market.

SOA How? Actional is sold with an optional module called the "Governance Integration Module." For integration beyond standard UDDI integration, the Governance Integration Module is required. This module abstracts out the various repositories so that we can publish all sorts of cool things beyond service endpoints, like real-time service statistics, dependencies, and policy information. It also make is architecturally-easy to add new registries as circumstances demand. As for integration with IONA's registry... for that, you'll have to wait until we announce and further discuss roadmaps. I can't talk about roadmaps, but I hope I've addressed Rob's concern about partner ecosystem implications.