Company News • 30.06.2008

Progress Software Corporation Acquires Mindreef Inc.

Actional and Mindreef SOA Management Products Together First to Address the Entire SOA Lifecycle with Best-in-Class SOA Quality, Validation, and Runtime Governance

Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS), a global supplier of application infrastructure software used to develop, deploy, integrate and manage business applications today announced the completion of the acquisition of privately-owned Mindreef, Inc., the SOA Quality Company. Mindreef develops and markets the award-winning Mindreef SOAPscope products, which enable different IT users such as business analysts, system architects, application developers, testers, operations and support staff to build, deploy, and maintain better software at each phase of an SOA, Web service or composite application development lifecycle. With the combination of Actional and SOAPscope, Progress is the first and only company to address the entire SOA lifecycle with best-in-class SOA quality and validation capabilities and industry-leading runtime governance capabilities, ensuring the success of SOA deployments.

The Mindreef SOAPscope product family comprises SOAPscope Server, SOAPscope Architect, SOAPscope Tester, and SOAPscope Developer and joins the Progress Actional SOA Management product family that provides policy-based visibility, security, and control for services, middleware, and business processes. This acquisition continues Progress' expansion of its best-in-class SOA Portfolio and strengthens the company's position as a leader in independent, standards-based, heterogeneous, distributed SOA infrastructure.

Dan Foody, vice president, Actional Products, Progress Software, commented: "Mindreef has created one of the most successful SOA quality and validation products, used by more than 3,000 customers, with core strengths in the pre-production phases of the SOA lifecycle. Progress Actional SOA Management products, in contrast, have core strengths in the production phase, where independent industry analysts Gartner and Forrester Research consider Actional products to be leaders. With more than 100 Mindreef customers added each month and with Actional growing at more than 100%, by bringing these products lines together Progress addresses the complete SOA lifecycle with the strongest offering for every lifecycle phase."

Frank Grossman, co-founder and President of Mindreef, Inc., noted: "The quality and validation capabilities within the Mindreef products seamlessly enhance the visibility and management features available from the Actional SOA Management products, resulting in a synergy that can help enterprises achieve greater success with the services they deliver. This synergy will help IT managers more effectively detect and avoid issues, including mismatches in expectations between service consumers and service providers, earlier in the service lifecycle, thus reducing the risk of these being discovered during either integration testing or the production phase, when such issues can be potentially more costly to the organization."

Even when issues do arise in production, the combination of Actional and SOAPscope products will allow application support teams to detect business exceptions and collaborate with other stakeholders to analyze the cause, repair the issues, and resubmit messages so that the business transactions are completed successfully.

Sandra Rogers, Program Director for SOA, Web services, and Integration research at IDC, commented: "A more integrated and holistic services and SOA lifecycle approach is increasingly important as enterprises build out composite applications with more sophisticated business processes and complex transaction paths, using components built and owned by various individuals and teams. It is critical that all stakeholders have the right level of visibility, interaction, and trust in the overall environment, in a more automated and integrated capacity from development through to retirement. It is also important to ensure expectations are well defined, understood, and met regarding how services are to behave and perform, and how each party can respond and address change."
 

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