Progress Software's Sonic ESB® Ranked Number One Worldwide for ESB Segment in Research Report by Industry Analyst Firm; Doubling Annual Revenue Places Sonic at the Top of Rapidly Growing ESB Market

Business Wire, June 20, 2006

BEDFORD, Mass. -- Progress Software Corporation (Nasdaq: PRGS), a supplier of leading technology to develop, deploy, integrate and manage business applications, today announced that its Progress Sonic ESB(R) product ranked first in the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) segment of Gartner Dataquest's latest report on the worldwide application integration and middleware (AIM) market. The report, "Market Share: AIM and Portal Software, Worldwide, 2005," published June 9, 2006, provides market share results for the AIM market in seven worldwide regions.

Overall, the Gartner Dataquest report noted that the ESB market expanded more significantly in 2005 than any other AIM segment with 160.7 percent revenue growth. Revenues for Sonic ESB increased from $8.7 million in 2004 to $18.5 million in 2005, increasing by over 113%.

According to the report, "The introduction of Web services and the resulting popularization of SOA caused a major upheaval in this market. Before 2002, integration backbones were largely proprietary, and many application developers were unknowledgeable about SOA and event-driven design. During 2002 through 2004, a new type of middleware, ESBs, came to market to exploit Web-services standards and the growing interest in SOA."

"We introduced the world's first ESB product over four years ago and are proud to lead the market in product capability, market share and customer success," said Gordon Van Huizen, vice president of Sonic products at Progress Software. "We intend to extend this lead with Sonic ESB 7.0, released in May 2006. The new release streamlines the full SOA project lifecycle in complex, distributed environments through a new Eclipse-based toolset, while providing a highly robust implementation of advanced Web-services standards suitable for large-scale, mission-critical deployments--a powerful capability that no other vendor can provide today."

Over 300 of the world's most demanding enterprise and government customers rely on Sonic ESB as the backbone of their SOA implementations including: American Red Cross; AutoTrader; Bank of America; BAA Heathrow; City of Washington, D.C.; The Gillette Company; ProFlowers; Rotech Healthcare; Telecom Italia; and Tarrant County, TX. Recently, BT selected Sonic ESB to embed within their integration appliance as part of BT Integrate, a managed integration service offering supporting SOA.

"Sonic ESB allows Tarrant County to deliver the right information to the right person at the right time, and is a core part of the county's SOA strategy," said Mark O'Neal, Integrated Justice project manager for Tarrant County, Texas, one of the fastest growing urban counties in the United States. "When you're supporting the criminal justice system, even occasional downtime isn't acceptable. From the start we recognized that Sonic was head and shoulders above the competition in terms of enterprise quality of service and reliability, and this carries into the way they've implemented these advanced Web-services standards. The new Eclipse-based tools dramatically improve our productivity in developing and deploying services across the county."

About Progress Software Corporation

Progress Software Corporation (Nasdaq: PRGS) is a global industry leader providing application infrastructure software for all aspects of the development, deployment, integration and management of business applications. Headquartered in Bedford, Mass., Progress can be reached at www.progress.com or 1-781-280-4000.

Progress, Actional, DataDirect, OpenEdge, Sonic ESB, Apama, EasyAsk, DataDirect Connect, Shadow RTE, DataDirect XQuery and Progress OpenEdge are trademarks or registered trademarks of Progress Software Corporation or one of its subsidiaries or affiliates in the U.S. and other countries.

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