Sonic ties up adapter deal

Sonic Software on Monday plans to announce a partnership with iWay Software that it hopes will boost its standing in the integration software niche.

Under the deal, Sonic will resell so-called "adapters" from iWay to improve data exchange between disparate applications. Sonic's software is analogous to a network switch in that it transports data between different applications in a reliable and scalable way.

Businesses use messaging middleware such as SonicMQ or IBM's MQSeries to link business systems, rather than employ in-house programmers to write custom code. A company could, for example, use this integration middleware to share data between sales and accounting applications from two different providers.

iWay also participates in the application integration market, but is focused on software for actually accessing disparate data sources, rather than the data transport. iWay licenses its adapters for packaged applications, as well as other applications, to companies like BEA Systems and Software AG.

The combined products will give Sonic's customers a quicker way to bind different data sources and give developers a greater control over the data they extract from systems, according to Sonic executives. Sonic will act as a single point of contact for the combined products.

The partnership follows an upgrade to SonicMQ, released last week. Version 5 of SonicMQ adds the ability to create a cluster of servers to act as a backup in case of one server's failure. The company has also expanded the management console to handle thousands of distributed servers running SonicMQ software. The software also now works with third-party security systems and directories to restrict data access.

SonicMQ 5.0 costs $5,000 per processor for a deployment license and $2,500 per processor for a developer license. Sonic Software is owned by database maker Progress Software.