Progress Software extends SOA reach with new deployment manager offering

Progress Software Corp. is offering developers a leg up in clearing one of the last hurdles in service-oriented architecture (SOA) -- deployment. Its Sonic Deployment Manager (SDM), which it announced this week, is designed to allow enterprises to model all aspects of a deployment and test production environments before roll-out.

SOA can provide many benefits to an enterprise -- agility and lower cost come to mind -- but it's not without its challenges. Once a company has decided on a SOA strategy, put an infrastructure in place, and tackled such issues as data access and governance, it's still faced with the daunting task of deployment, rolling out applications across the enterprise and across the lifecycle of each component.

Progress says the two key uses for SDM are lifecycle management and large-scale deployments. SDM can create a reproducible package of all components and configurations of a given deployment instance, which would allow precise rollback and recreation of a given environment, which would enable configuration management, auditing, and regulatory compliance.

Among the features of SDM, which is now available for $15,000, are:

• Rapid, large scale deployment to automate installation and configuration on a large number of target systems.
• Support for fast, iterative development to streamline migration from development through QA and to production.
• Remote domain and site support for upgrading over a network.
• Automated installation and configuration for tailored configuration.
• Model-driven functionality that allows developers to model the installation independent of the machine parameters.

Last July, I had a lengthy podcast discussion about Software as a Service (SaaS) with Colleen Smith, managing director of Saas for Progress. You can listen to the podcast here.