Sonic Software Corp.: Sharing in the Military's Integration Effort

Computerworld -

Sonic Software Corp.

PARENT COMPANY: Progress Software Corp.

CATEGORY: Enterprise software

LOCATION: Bedford, Mass.

TECHNOLOGY: Sonic Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

HOW IT WORKS: ESB is an open-standards-based system for allowing historically proprietary systems to share data through the use of Web services, XML and intelligent routing. Its scalability is derived from a robust messaging infrastructure and Sonic's architecture, which is based on the notion of "service containers."

CUSTOMER Sampling: Bank of America Corp., Goldman Sachs & Co., KeySpan Corp., Siemens AG, Northrop Grumman Mission Systems

TIP: Some things to consider in an ESB system include a security infrastructure that allows authentication, authorization and encryption capabilities across the ESB as well as easy integration of Web services.

WHAT'S IN STORE: Dennis Byron, an analyst at Framingham, Mass.-based IDC, says ESB technology will make intercompany transfers a lot easier. It has the potential of ushering in the idea of "e-community," or "business-to-business e-commerce on a grand scale, not just point-to-point business-to-business, but multiple points of business-to-business," he says.

A recent IDC report said that reliance on standards-based technologies is an important aspect of a successful distributed enterprise computing strategy and is "key to success."

User Profile

As you might expect, a combat unit's IT requirements are critical. They can include identifying a threat, deciding whether action is needed, notifying the chain of command—even firing a mortar or vectoring a plane, says Jon Johnson, chief engineer at military defense contractor Northrop Grumman Mission Systems in Colorado Springs.

Meeting those critical IT needs takes systems integration. In the military, "whatever it is, you've got to take care of it," says Johnson.

To accomplish this, Northrop Grumman has been using middleware developed by Sonic Software that allows applications in heterogeneous enterprises to share data.

This technology, called Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), is built on Sonic's messaging software and uses a variety of open standards, such as Java, SOAP and XML, to link together disparate applications.

Before ESB was used, custom interfaces had to be built, but they were expensive and incomplete, says Johnson. Open standards reduce cost, and users can often rely on the skills of their own IT staffs to deploy and manage this integration approach, he says.

Johnson particularly likes Sonic's adherence to standards.

"They really abide by the specifications and the standards," he says. "You can use their product without being sucked into proprietary additions to APIs [application programming interfaces]."

Johnson says he thinks ESB will help the military reach its goal of developing a Global Information Grid Enterprise Services architecture that will function as a "big data broker" to which all of the military's services can publish.

In a report released this past March, IDC predicted that ESB "will revolutionize IT and enable flexible and scalable distributed computing for generations to come." The report called ESB a flexible, reliable infrastructure that "can enable a new type of corporation—one that is not held captive to rigid IT capabilities, but rather can respond almost instantaneously to meet business opportunities."