Sonic unveils improved ESB

Sonic Software has released version 5.5 of its Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) middleware, which is designed to provide automated message recovery for online real-time systems.

Sonic 5.5, available immediately, adds fault tolerance by replicating every message on a second system, and can automatically recover in seven to 15 seconds, according to Sonic.

"Companies have spent millions on high availability but this is the Achilles heel. Applications come up very quickly, but recovering messaging between applications is much more complex," said Alun Baker, Sonic's EMEA managing director.

The company said that other improvements include better usability and performance, while the underlying SonicMQ 6.0 Java Messaging System software, released two weeks ago, adds messaging functionality.

Sonic defined the term ESB in building a low-cost application intercommunication and data conversion system on top of its SonicMQ messaging software.

Analysts such as Gartner and IDC see this approach as the future for enterprise application integration (EAI). EAI vendors such as Tibco and webMethods also have plans to offer ESB.

Applications, services and data sources needing interconnection have only to plug into the ESB using one of a choice of connectors, avoiding the spaghetti of point-to-point connections.

Gartner estimates that 15 per cent of enterprise applications are integrated using EAI techniques, with the rest point-to-point.