NEW YORK, June 23 -- WSO2, the open source SOA company, today announced the availability of the open source WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), Version 1.7 to support enterprises’ heterogeneous, high-volume service-oriented architecture (SOA) demands. The WSO2 ESB 1.7 offers significant new enhancements to stability and availability -- resulting in incredible scalability and error-free connections for high-volume SOA environments, even on standard hardware. Version 1.7 of the WSO2 ESB now integrates closely with the full-featured WSO2 Registry 1.1 for true, enterprise-class SOA governance.

The WSO2 ESB 1.7 is being introduced at the 13th Annual SOA World Conference & Expo East, being held June 23-24, 2008 at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York.

The WSO2 ESB 1.7 also adds support for the financial services sector through two standard protocols. The Financial Information eXchange (FIX) protocol is a series of messaging specifications for the electronic communication of trade-related messages, which the WSO2 ESB supports in combination with the QuickFix/J open source project. The Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) is an open standard business messaging protocol originally developed for financial services, but also gaining ground in many other industries. The WSO2 ESB 1.7 has been thoroughly tested and is certified to work with the Apache Qpid implementation of AMQP. Using the WSO2 ESB 1.7, developers in the financial services market can leverage their existing investments in these widely adopted protocols.

Cementing the abilities of the WSO2 ESB for mission-critical applications, the clustering support has been enhanced to allow hot updates of a cluster in a continuously live environment.

“The growth of SOA implementations to drive critical business operations is placing new demands on the performance, reliability and governance of Web services,” said Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, CEO of WSO2. “Our WSO2 ESB 1.7 sets a new standard for meeting those demands through innovative concurrency and clustering. The combination of the WSO2 ESB and WSO2 Registry provides a complete SOA governance solution from design through runtime.”

In scaling tests on a standard dual-processor server, the WSO2 ESB 1.7 handled loads of up to 2,500 concurrent connections without losing a single message. In the same tests, comparable open source ESBs failed to handle more than one hundred concurrent clients without errors.

“SOA is emerging as a backbone in high-transaction volume businesses, driving the need for more scalable ESB technology,” said James Governor, principal analyst and founder of RedMonk. “WSO2 is responding to that demand with its latest release, which focuses on performance, reliability and availability -- and tighter integration with its Registry product.”

WSO2 ESB 1.7 Features

The WSO2 ESB provides a lightweight platform that can route messages with millisecond overhead and can scale to manage thousands of simultaneous connections -- on standard server hardware. Version 1.7 is based on the Apache Synapse ESB 1.2 release launched earlier this month (For more information, visit http://synapse.apache.org). The WSO2 ESB is a pure open source project that enhances the Apache Synapse ESB with a full graphical management and configuration console, as well as an integrated registry and repository based on the WSO2 Registry 1.1, which also is being launched today.

Key new features in Version 1.7 of the WSO2 ESB include:

• Support for high-volume messaging, delivering lossless handling of large messages at high concurrency on standard hardware. The streaming, asynchronous design ensures that the WSO2 ESB can be used to manage any SOA without adding the performance bottlenecks usually associated with XML mediation.

• Improved clustering, providing continuous availability by allowing members of a cluster to be restarted without losing payloads.

• Wide legacy connectivity, including Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), comma-separated values (CSV), and record formats.

• Hessian binary Web service protocol support, enabling high-performance binary Web service routing and management.

• Connection pooling improves database performance and scalability.

• Router mediator enables dynamic routing capabilities.

Built on a standards-based architecture, the WSO2 ESB 1.7 works equally well with WSO2’s products; J2EE, .NET, JMS, and HTTP/S-based systems; and Web services frameworks, such as Apache Axis and Axis2.

About WSO2

WSO2 is the open source SOA company founded by pioneers in Web services and the Apache Software Foundation Web services community. The company delivers the only tightly integrated, entirely open source middleware stack that is optimized for SOA. The WSO2 products address the core components of SOAs: service creation, connection, composition and governance. The company is backed by Intel Capital and maintains operations in the United States, United Kingdom and Sri Lanka. For more information, visit http://wso2.com.