End-to-End Solution Extends CICS Events Capability to Include Mainframe Database Business Events and Complex Event Processing

DENVER, CO and BEDFORD, MA -- (Marketwire) -- 08/24/09 -- Progress DataDirect, the data infrastructure division of Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS) and provider of premium, vendor-independent data access and integration technologies, today announced at the SHARE Conference its support for event processing capabilities available in the IBM Customer Information Control System (CICS)Transaction Server (TS) version 4.1, allowing organizations that rely on System z mainframes to more fully exploit the benefits of event-driven architectures.

IBM mainframes are the dominant platform for financial services and serve as a vital infrastructure component for many industries, including manufacturing, telecommunications and state and local government institutions. With cross-industry appeal, the top 50 worldwide banks and 22 of the top U.S. retailers run IBM System z. IBM CICS is one of the most widely used mainframe application hosting environments in the world, and as such is an environment rich in business meaningful events.

With the launch of CICS TS v4.1, IBM has included new event technologies to enable CICS to be configured to feed business event processing engines and business dashboards without the need for application change. CICS event processing is focused on application events of significance to the business, rather than systems management or IT events. The primary intent of this function is to allow existing applications to be non-invasively instrumented for events, so that events can be produced by the applications without the need for any code changes. The ability to generate business events without changing application programs both reduces cost and complexity and delivers compliant flexible business solutions.

Progress Software, through its Progress® Apama® event processing and Progress® DataDirect® Shadow® products, provides a comprehensive, end-to-end solution to complement and extend CICS TS v4.1 events. The Apama product offers a flexible, Complex Event Processing (CEP) platform for building event-driven applications. Apama event processing monitors rapidly moving event streams, detects and analyzes important patterns and acts in sub-millisecond time. With Apama event processing, CICS business events now can be correlated and analyzed in real-time, providing new levels of decision-making that dramatically improve operational responsiveness.