Progress launches retail SOA

Progress Software has launched BusinessEdge for Retail, a range of retail applications built using service-oriented architectures (SOA). The applications span the entire retailing cycle from the point-of-sale, through head office, distribution and the supply chain. Progress claims that SOA presents an opportunity for retailers to achieve broad-scale interoperability of IT systems, while providing the flexibility required to continually adapt these systems to changing business requirements – which is after all exactly what SOA is supposed to be about!

BusinessEdge for Retail provides the SOA infrastructure necessary to simplify the interoperability of any application or business process both within and outside the retail enterprise, and supports an incremental move to SOA. It includes ObjectStore RFID Accelerator, an EPC-compliant, real-time, in-memory database designed to collect, correlate and propagate data generated from Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags to improve tracking and traceability. It also uses Sonic ESB (enterprise service bus) as a common way of working with various services – including everything from web services to relational databases – without the need for additional development time and hand coding (which significantly diminishes SOA flexibility).