SOA Vendors Lead Synapse Project for Apache Software Foundation

LEADING SOA VENDORS ANNOUNCE SYNAPSE PROJECT TO DEVELOP WEB SERVICE MEDIATION
FRAMEWORK
 
Blue Titan, Infravio, IONA, Sonic Software and WSO2 Join Forces to Create
Open-Source Service Broker Based on Apache AXIS2
 
COLOMBO, SRI LANKA — August 22, 2005 — WSO2, a company started by key leaders
of the Apache Web Services Project, today announced the creation of Synapse,
a new project tasked with creating a Web service mediation framework. The
project proposal has been submitted to the Apache Software Foundation
"incubator" under the Web Services project.
 
Synapse is an open source implementation of a Web service mediation framework
and components for use in developing and deploying SOA infrastructures.
Synapse provides a framework to intermediate between two or more Web
Services, allowing users to introduce transformation and routing, promote
loose coupling between services, and support greater reliability and
resiliency. Additional details about Synapse are available on the Apache
Software Foundation Incubator site at
http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/SynapseProposal.
 
WSO2 is joined by a list of leading companies in the Web Services and ESB
spaces, including Blue Titan, IONA, Infravio and Sonic Software. These
companies will draw on their industry expertise and leadership positions to
build a set of components that work together with Axis2 and other Apache /
open source projects to create a flexible transformation, management and
routing system. To seed this project, Infravio will donate code from its
X-Broker product. 
 
“We are pleased to work with industry leaders on the mediation aspects of Web
Services,” said Paul Fremantle, vice president of technology at WSO2.
“Synapse is another significant step towards our objective of creating the
best possible Web Services platform in Apache.”
 
“The emergence of an open source Web service mediation project under the
auspices of the Apache Software Foundation and its successful model for
achieving wide-spread adoption represents a major step forward for the
evolution of Web Services,” said Dave Chappell, vice president and chief
technology evangelist for Sonic Software, and author of the O’Reilly ESB
book. “Synapse provides the ideal open, community-based environment for
establishing a common, interoperable mediation framework for Web Services,
and it will be influential in driving adoption of SOA principles in the
industry at large.”
 
“Our donation of X-Broker code to Synapse reflects our continuing commitment
to open standards and open source development,” said Miko Matsumura, vice
president of technology at Infravio. “We are excited to be working with such
a high quality group of companies and individuals. Our primary focus is SOA
Registry and this project ensures our customers an open, compatible and
complementary run time environment.”
 
“Companies are increasingly interested in leveraging the benefits of open
source software to support their SOA initiatives,” said Eric Newcomer, CTO,
IONA. “We’re excited that ObjectWeb’s Celtix open source ESB will contribute
to Synapse, the Apache incubator project to develop an open source mediation
framework. There are many technologies required to deploy a successful SOA,
and the Synapse community clearly understands these requirements.”
 
“We view the development of open technologies as critical to SOA adoption and
are excited to be working with industry leaders on the creation of Synapse,”
said Frank Martinez, CTO and chairman of Blue Titan Software. “Blue Titan
believes mediation models and frameworks enable customers to design, deploy
and scale SOAs in real-world heterogeneous environments. Synapse will be an
open source technology that will help customers be successful with their SOA
deployments while leveraging the standards-compliance, interoperability and
Web Services focus offered by Apache Axis2.”
 
“One year after the launch of ObjectWeb's ESB initiative, we are very happy
to see that open source is becoming increasingly popular amongst the vendors
of integration solutions,” said Jean-Pierre Laisné, ObjectWeb Chairman of the
Board and Linux & Open Source Initiative Manager with Bull. “We encourage
projects and communities to find synergies and work together, and will work
to make ObjectWeb instrumental in this respect.”
 
About Blue Titan Software
Blue Titan Software, the services networking company, helps enterprises
deploy and manage their service-oriented architectures by enabling IT to
control, share and scale services and applications. Business innovation can
therefore be driven across the distributed enterprise in a timely,
manageable, and future-ready manner. Founded in 2001 by enterprise software
veterans, renowned business technologists and leading investors, Blue Titan
Software is headquartered in San Francisco, CA. Fortune 500 customers include
British American Tobacco, Citigroup, Yahoo!, and Pfizer.
 
About Infravio, Inc.
Infravio, Inc. is a leading provider of SOA technologies based on open
software and standards. Founded in 1999, Infravio has deep expertise through
award-winning Fortune 1000 customer projects. Infravio X-Registry Platform™
provides SOA builders with visualization, design time, run time, and change
governance across the lifecycle. It features the patent pending Service
Delivery Contracts™ to improve the configurability and agility of services.
Headquartered in Cupertino, California, Infravio is backed by venture capital
firms, Walden International and Crystal Ventures, as well as NetIQ Corp.
(Nasdaq: NTIQ). For more information, please call 1.408.861.3000, email
info@infravio.com, or visit http://www.infravio.com.
 
About IONA 
For more than a decade, IONA® Technologies (NASDAQ: IONA) has been a world
leader in delivering high-performance integration solutions for Global 2000
IT environments. IONA pioneered standards-based integration with its
CORBA-based Orbix® products. Artix™, IONA’s extensible Enterprise Service
Bus, enables existing enterprise systems to be integrated with an
organization’s common infrastructure components.  IONA’s sponsorship of the
ObjectWeb Celtix open source ESB is a natural extension of the company’s
history of solving integration problems by leveraging open standards and
distributed architectures.
 
IONA is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, with U.S. headquarters in Waltham,
Massachusetts and offices worldwide. For additional information about IONA,
visit our Web site at http://www.iona.com.
 
About ObjectWeb
Founded in 2002 by Bull, France Telecom and INRIA, ObjectWeb is a consortium
of leading companies and research organizations from around the world who
have joined forces to produce next generation of Open Source Middleware.
ObjectWeb's goal is to provide Real-Time Enterprises with independent
solutions which combine quality and robustness at the best possible
performance/cost ratio. ObjectWeb targets alternative solutions to
proprietary products for e-business, ESB, data connectivity, grid computing,
and enterprise messaging. Based on Open Standards, ObjectWeb's middleware
includes application servers, components, frameworks and tools. 
 
About Sonic Software
Sonic Software is the inventor and leading provider of the enterprise service
bus (ESB), a new communication and integration infrastructure that supports
the enterprise requirements of a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Sonic’s
technology delivers the scalability, security, continuous availability and
management capabilities necessary to connect, integrate and control
distributed, mission critical business processes. Over 1,000 customers use
Sonic products to achieve broad-scale interoperability of IT systems and the
flexibility to adapt these systems to ever-changing business needs.
 
Sonic Software is an independent operating company of Progress Software
Corporation (Nasdaq: PRGS), a US$360+ million global software industry
leader. Headquartered in Bedford, Mass., Sonic Software can be reached on the
Web at http://www.sonicsoftware.com, or by phone at +1-781-999-7000 or
1-866-GET-SONIC.
 
About WSO2
WSO2 is a new startup company building open source Web services middleware
platforms. Founded by pioneers in Web services and open source, WSO2
engineers contribute heavily to many key Apache Web services projects. In
addition to building key components in Apache, WSO2 is building integrated
Web services platforms which will offer industry leading performance and
convenience for customers. WSO2's business model is to sell support for the
software it helps build in open source. For more information, see
http://www.wso2.com/.
 
About Apache Software Foundation
The Apache Software Foundation provides organizational, legal, and financial
support for a broad range of open source software projects. The Foundation
provides an established framework for intellectual property and financial
contributions that simultaneously limits contributors potential legal
exposure.
 
Through a collaborative and meritocratic development process, Apache projects
deliver enterprise-grade, freely available software products that attract
large communities of users. The pragmatic Apache License makes it easy for
all users, commercial and individual, to deploy Apache products.
 
For more information on The Apache Software Foundation, please see
http://www.apache.org/ 
 
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