Interview With Sonic Software's Gordon Van Huizen

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With its innovative Enterprise Service Bus, Sonic Software of Bedford, Massachusetts is pleasing companies hungry for cost-effective applications integration. Sonic began as a business unit of Progress Software in 1999 to address the standards-based messaging market with its successful SonicMQ product. The company operates independently from its parent, however, selling directly to enterprise customers, through Sonic’s own field and marketing organization. Recently Sonic teamed with iWay Software and its breadth of adapters, to deliver even greater integration, all of which attracts today’s enterprises, according to Sonic’s Chief Technology Officer Gordon Van Huizen. “The notion of an Enterprise Service Bus that spans the enterprise connecting together diverse applications and then binding into business partner systems at the edge is absolutely fundamental IT technology,” Van Huizen tells technology writer Connie Winkler.

IB MAGAZINE: Sonic Software deals with customers facing application integration challenges. What are they up against today?

VAN HUIZEN: There’s increased pressure for IT to connect more systems, more rapidly. Integration was a new thing to do five to seven years ago, and was a source of competitive differentiation a couple of years ago, but today it’s absolutely imperative to provide your business with capabilities like global views across business systems and to reduce the cycle time of business processes. That requires integration. However, existing approaches to integration – for example, using integration brokers – have proven too expensive, too time consuming, and employ too many proprietary technologies. Clearly a new approach is needed.

IB MAGAZINE: What is Sonic’s Enterprise Service Bus?

VAN HUIZEN: An enterprise service bus (ESB) stems from two fundamental concepts: that over time applications will be built to integrate in a service-oriented way, and that integration software’s role is to reliably and flexibly link applications together across the extended enterprise.

An ESB contains three main ingredients: First, a standards-based communication infrastructure provides reliable, distributed connectivity between the applications. Second, a distributed services deployment and management environment supports connecting many diverse applications through one unified infrastructure, potentially in a geographically diverse environment. Then, the ESB layers in the capabilities basic to an integration broker such as transformation of data between applications, and the intelligent routing of information between applications.

IB MAGAZINE: Doesn’t an ESB preclude the use of adapters such as iWay provides?

VAN HUIZEN: It’s just the opposite and this is where it gets interesting: We can all imagine a future where all new applications are exposed services so that they’re ready to integrate – but, by and large those applications don’t exist yet. The reality is that the vast majority of applications within the enterprise are not service-oriented. Quite often it’s necessary to rapidly integrate with an existing system in a deep way and that’s where iWay adapters play a key role.

By “in a deep way” I mean that iWay adapters understand the behaviors of the applications they’re binding into and how to surface those behaviors in a more general fashion. The adapters are highly aware of the existing intricacies in the packaged applications or existing transaction processing systems. When coupled with an ESB, iWay adapters allow you to build a service-oriented architecture across virtually any set of existing applications. ESBs support the integration of a larger set of applications across the enterprise, and can actually drive the deployment of more adapters.

IB MAGAZINE: Is this why Sonic Software has recently partnered with iWay?

VAN HUIZEN: Yes, iWay’s approach to the adapter market – developing feature-rich adapters that support the breadth of today’s enterprise systems – is very much the correct one, and requires the specialization iWay has built over the years. iWay’s go-to-market strategy of selling their adapters through a broad set of integration players, who then bind them into their own integration offerings, is a smart, sustainable one. It allows iWay to spread the cost of specialized adapter development across a larger community and, in turn, allows vendors like Sonic to benefit from this specialized integration work. The depth and breath of adapter offerings was absolutely vital to us.

IB MAGAZINE: What about other approaches to integration – application servers or the increasingly popular Web services?

VAN HUIZEN: Application servers are beginning to include some technologies associated with application integration, and can provide more cost-effective, standards-based application integration than old integration brokers. However, from an architecture point of view, they replicate integration brokers, with all applications connected to a central point in order to converse.

Most large enterprises have a number of geographically dispersed applications, which application servers don’t support very well. Nor do application servers support connecting lots of endpoints, or have the management capabilities for this more network-based view of integrating applications. We find that when customers begin integrating through application server-based products, or through portals, that they often hit a wall and turn to ESBs for the integration layer of their architectures.

IB MAGAZINE: Sonic’s ESB has been described as being “at the intersection of packaged applications, vertical protocols, and service-enabled applications that are built to integrate.” Are you describing this IT intersection?

VAN HUIZEN: Yes, the Enterprise Service Bus treats all applications as services regardless of how they are bound into the ESB. In other words, you don’t have to turn every application into a Web service to allow it to participate in the ESB. We bridge these two worlds: the existing world of packaged applications with proprietary technologies, and this new service-oriented, standards-based world that we’re moving into.

IB MAGAZINE: Wouldn’t Web services deliver this same connectivity, say, to trading portals?

VAN HUIZEN: Especially moving forward, Web services are a vital technology and a useful model for thinking about integrating applications. However, Web services technologies are still in their infancy – even being able to connect to an application in an asynchronous and reliable way is not yet supported. With the ESB we extend the basic notion of a Web service to provide what’s missing: We bring in the asynchronous and reliable communication, along with a complete architecture to support the deployment, management, and orchestration of services.

IB MAGAZINE: Can you give examples of customers using ESB?

VAN HUIZEN: We have a wide range. ABNA, a division of Associated British Foods, was an early adopter using the ESB to integrate internal systems across their operating businesses and into an agricultural trading hub. Another, Armstrong World Industries already had a fair amount of internal EAI connecting their ERP systems, but their integration broker-based approach didn’t work when linking their distribution chain. The flooring, ceiling and cabinet maker selected an ESB as the common infrastructure to span these diverse partners.

Also, we have a number of telecommunications companies, retail chains and government agencies deploying Sonic ESB, often on a broad-scale and providing the integration network behind enterprise portals. One telecommunications customer deploys the ESB at the center of 40 IT projects.

IB MAGAZINE: When talking with customers about the ESB approach, what iWay adapters are they most interested in?

VAN HUIZEN: This is one of the reasons we selected iWay as our primary adapter partner: We have customers interested in a wide variety of adapter types, from ones supporting industry-specific protocols and exchange standards such as SWIFT (financial messaging) and HIPAA (health services) to packaged applications from SAP and Siebel. Other customers extend ESB into existing transaction processing environments running on IBM’s CICS transaction server or BEA’s Tuxedo, as well as into massive data warehouses running on Teradata’s products.

IB MAGAZINE: In the midst of this technology recession, how has Sonic thrived?

VAN HUIZEN: A key to Sonic’s inception is that we provide a standards-based solution with enterprise-grade functionality – high performance, scalability and reliability. Building on this, we are now changing the economics of how companies integrate their applications through lower license costs and – more fundamentally – through the approach that is employed. Integrating through an ESB takes less time and outside consulting services than with traditional approaches, and results in a standards-based infrastructure that companies can grow with. This last is key in today’s business climate.

Although IT today wants to build out sustainable strategic infrastructure, the funding model is project-based. ESB customers typically buy a set of licenses for an initial project and then add more as additional integration projects roll out. This is a win for the customer and a sustainable, growing business for Sonic.

IB MAGAZINE: Do you sense that Sonic is stirring up the industry?

VAN HUIZEN: From recent financial announcements, it’s fair to say the integration market – as defined by the first wave of vendors – is in a painful spot. Yet, Sonic’s revenues grow. There’s a great deal of support for a standards-based, cost-effective approach to broad-scale integration. We see vendors with centralized, proprietary solutions at a disadvantage and the marketplace seems to agree.

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