Bedford, Massachusetts-based Progress gained shareholder approval for the deal as 2002 came to a close and has now put into practice its intention to share out the eXceleon products between its independent subsidiaries.

While the XML-based extensible Information Server, Stylus Studio and Business Process Management products have gone to Progress’s Sonic Software Corp Java messaging subsidiary, eXcelon’s more traditional object-oriented data management products, such as ObjectStore, PSE/Pro and Javlin have gone to Progress’s core Progress Company database and development tool subsidiary.

Sonic Software is gearing up to announce its plans to focus on enterprise integration next month, and has already released an updated version of Stylus Studio XML development environment, but in the meantime Progress is focusing its attentions on the ObjectStore data management tools.

The ObjectStore business is very well aligned with the core Progress history because it’s a core database technology and, from a business point of view, is embedded in a lot of different applications, said Ken Rugg, former VP of development and chief technology officer at eXcelon, and now VP of development for the Progress Company’s ObjectStore division. It’s also a mature business that generates profits, rather than one that’s in the development stage, he added.

With the release last week of ObjectStore 6.1, Progress has signaled its intention to continue the development of the object-oriented database technology. The latest version of the product adds increased availability, clustering and replication technologies as support for Microsoft Corp’s Visual Studio .NET, Sun Microsystems Inc’s Java JDK 1.4, and Red Hat Inc’s Linux 8.0.

Alongside these technical advances, Progress is also looking to increase the marketing of ObjectStore and its associated technologies, said Rugg, to expand its audience beyond technical users. We’re looking to leverage the partner model of Progress, but ObjectStore has a very technical audience such as C++ and Java developers solving complex problems, he said. How do we make that easier to use and more applicable to business users that form the Progress channel?

One solution will be to make more of the Real Time Event Engine (RTEE), which is a high-performance application for the real-time capture, organization and querying of streaming event data, said Rugg. The former eXcelon product has been aimed at financial services and telecommunication firms, but has never benefited from a formal strategy, said Rugg.

While Progress will attempt to drive ObjectStore towards more general business usage with RTEE, it is not going to lose sight of its core capabilities, according to Rugg, which include CAD applications, telecommunications, GIS and complex transaction environments.

One of the things I think we have learned is that you have to be in a place where the database is adding unique value, he said. I think the thing we’ve seen is that it [the object-oriented database] has been outside the mainstream, but the technology is moving into places where it can be used in more mainstream ways.

Rugg gave the example of Amazon.com, which uses Oracle Corp’s database as its core business database, but utilizes ObjectStore as a mid-tier cache to deliver real-time information such as inventory information and pricing to its web site. It’s not a replacement, but sits alongside, Rugg said. ObjectStore has a distributed transaction caching architecture so the data is treated in memory and is stored in a format where the application is ready to use it.

Source: Computerwire