The deal will pair service-oriented architecture (SOA) products from Actional that monitor and govern services with Sonic's enterprise service bus (ESB), which is used to connect and orchestrate services, according to executives from Bedford, Mass.-based Sonic.

Actional's Looking GlassT is designed to provide end-to-end process visibility across an SOA to detect and monitor business transactions as they flow across application servers, databases and network appliances. Its SoapstationT provides policy-based security and access control, service level agreement management and enforcement.

While Sonic offers the infrastructure for executing business processes across an SOA, Actional will bring the Web services management that organizations increasingly want as they move to ramp up SOAs, Sonic President Greg O'Connor said in a statement.

Ron Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink LLC in Waltham, Mass., said the deal will add a missing component to Sonic's infrastructure for running and managing SOAs.

'One of the missing components of [Sonic's] runtime infrastructure was active management, as well as more robust security,' he said. 'By acquiring Actional, Progress has gained significant capabilities for management and security as part of their ESB runtime strategy.'