Sonic has extended its ESB-based SOA infrastructure line with two new products: the Sonic Collaboration Server for managing partner interactions; and the Sonic Database Service, which simplifies access and re-use of relational data sources.

A new deployment tool simplifies the entire SOA lifecycle, making it easier to deploy and continually upgrade services and processes across large-scale deployments. Enhancements to Sonic ESB® and the Sonic Workbench in the 6.1 release increase SOA development productivity with a new uniform service invocation model that allows services of any type, from Web services to databases, to be easily incorporated into the ESB.

Service-oriented architecture presents the opportunity for organisations to achieve broad-scale interoperability of IT systems, while providing the flexibility required to continually adapt these systems to changing business requirements. SOA requires a new type of software infrastructure, a common platform called the ESB that can connect, mediate and control a wide variety of services in a flexible manner across a distributed environment.

According to Gartner, Inc. Vice President and Research Fellow Roy Schulte, ESBs support both SOA and event-driven applications in a single middleware infrastructure with a common set of directory, security, transformation, validation and other services.

In his August 2004 report, What Is An Enterprise Service Bus?, Forrester Research, Inc. Vice President and Research Director Mike Gilpin states: "An enterprise service bus (ESB) is software infrastructure that enables service-oriented architecture (SOA) by acting as an intermediary layer of middleware through which a set of reusable business services are made widely available. An ESB helps enterprises obtain the value of SOA by increasing connectivity, adding flexibility that speeds change, and providing greater control over use of the important resources it binds."

"The dirty little secret of SOA products on the market today is that there is no common way of working with various services, including everything from Web services to relational databases, frequently requiring additional coding and significantly diminishing SOA flexibility, said Gordon Van Huizen, CTO of Sonic Software. Sonic is the first software vendor to address this gap head-on."

Van Huizen continued, "The enhancements in 6.1 are the result of working with hundreds of customers across the full lifecycle of an SOA, extending beyond initial implementation. This experience gives us a significant technology advantage over the competition. This latest release is the most comprehensive enterprise-grade infrastructure for SOA on the market today, and should be the choice for any organisation developing and executing their SOA strategy."