SCIENCE

Rogue Wave Software, a division of Quovadx, announced a new service-oriented architecture (SOA) framework, Rogue Wave Hydra, designed to facilitate the distribution of business processes within an application. Leveraging Rogue Wave Software's pioneering "Pipelines" technology, which focuses on achieving efficiency and scalability through parallel processing, Rogue Wave Hydra will empower IT architects and professional developers to achieve order-of-magnitude performance and throughput improvements for critical software applications. "Customers have told us that a convergence of circumstances and processing limitations is preventing them from taking advantage of growth and new business opportunities. Achieving the application performance and scalability that their businesses require demands a new paradigm in software development," said Cory Isaacson, president, Rogue Wave Software division, Quovadx. "With the introduction of Hydra, we are bringing the power of parallel processing to everyday business applications. As a result, we believe we are in a unique position to help IT architects and professional developers address SOA performance challenges head-on -- allowing them to adapt applications to exploit available processing resources, improving performance and business results." A typical software application is limited by the slowest component in any given business process. Further, while service-oriented architecture and enabling formats such as XML have been widely adopted for agility and flexibility by developers, this same flexibility has inflated the size, complexity and volume of transactions and messages, resulting in significant performance penalties. Applications must process transactions and messages efficiently to meet both current and future business demands. As business demands grow and become more dependent on information assets, core application requirements continue to grow in tandem. To effectively scale to meet these demands the employment of parallel processing, that is processing multiple tasks at the same time, becomes necessary. To date, parallel processing has been utilized for computation-intensive applications such as financial analytics and resolving complex biotech or engineering problems. However, this technology has not yet been widely adopted in generalized business applications. Parallel processing is complex, and general expertise is limited, requiring a new approach to meet performance demands while preserving key business rules. The Rogue Wave Hydra framework and its pipelines technology are designed to fill this void. Rogue Wave Hydra uses a core technology and associated methodology called "software pipelines." Pipelines allow for efficient execution and distribution of software components, or services, for simultaneous processing on available resources. This point-to-point architecture avoids bottlenecks, allowing businesses to achieve new levels of overall throughput and performance. According to research firm ZapThink, by 2010, 50 percent of the total services-oriented software market will have high-performance requirements. "The growing size and quantity of messages in SOA environments is a ticking-time bomb for businesses in a wide range of industries with high data and transaction requirements," said Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst, ZapThink, LLC. "The increasing burden on existing infrastructure caused by the large size and volume of messages will hinder scalability and performance unless companies actively look to take advantage of all options, from hardware to parallel processing, to allow for continued performance improvements and to ensure continued scalability of service-oriented and metadata intensive applications." Rogue Wave Hydra will allow developers to address major service-oriented and parallel processing development challenges while capitalizing on existing software assets. Rogue Wave Hydra was created in collaboration with Rogue Wave design partners and is currently in Beta implementation stages with select proof-of-concept (POC) customers in the financial services, telecommunications, call center, health insurance and software industries. "Rogue Wave Software brings unique expertise and experience from its years of working with software developers and track record providing tools that allow developers to focus on improving functionality and meeting critical business needs," said Harvey A. Wagner, president and CEO of Quovadx. "We look forward to leveraging our long-standing expertise in high-performance software and innovative pipelines technology to help our customers create scalable SOA solutions that allow them to take advantage of new business opportunities and drive future growth." Hydra will be generally available in March 2006. To learn more about Hydra, please visit its Web site.