Progress Sonic products enable the integration and flexible re-use of business applications within a large, physically distributed service-oriented architecture (SOA). SDM allows enterprises to model all aspects of a Sonic product deployment and to test production environments prior to roll-out. Additionally, by automating consistent and repeatable installations and configurations, SDM reduces the time to deploy at a remote site from days to minutes, even at remote sites with no IT staff.

Uniquely, SDM has the ability to create a completely reproducible package of all components and configurations of a given deployment instance. This capability allows precise rollback and re-creation of any given environment, enabling configuration management, auditing and regulatory compliance.

Two of the key use cases for the Sonic Deployment Manager product are lifecycle management and large scale deployments where SDM delivers on the critical need to have consistent, repeatable deployments both between lifecycle stages and also across a widely distributed environment.

"The sizable Sonic products installed base provides plenty of real-world customer experience to guide product direction," said Brad Shimmin, Principal Analyst, Application Infrastructures, Current Analysis. "As organisations become more sophisticated in their SOA deployments, tools like the Sonic Deployment Manager are necessary to reduce the time and cost associated with managing those deployments."

Components of both Progress Sonic ESB and Progress SonicMQ (the enterprise messaging infrastructure that underpins Sonic ESB) are managed with SDM, including brokers, clusters, container and services.

"Many of our customers, and especially those that have a headquarters in one location but a physical presence in several locations, use SDM for what they call 'hands-off deployments,'" said David White, Sonic Product Marketing Manager, Progress Software Corporation. "SDM is critical for enterprises that succeeded at the SOA project level and are ready to move their SOA project enterprise wide."