Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS) a leading software provider that enables enterprises to be operationally responsive, today announced that West Bend Mutual Insurance has selected the Progress^® Sonic® ESB (enterprise service bus) and Progress Actional^® products to build a service-oriented architecture (SOA) based IT infrastructure. West Bend Mutual Insurance, a property and casualty insurance carrier, is pulling together dozens of disparate internal policy administration applications into a single integrated insurance portal.

The seamless integration of West Bend Mutual Insurance’s applications will help reduce the cost of business processes and improve their ability to react more quickly to business opportunities. This increased business agility will enable West Bend Mutual to accelerate the introduction of new insurance products in order to help them grow their business in a soft market.

Craig Walker, IT director, West Bend Mutual Insurance Company, commented: “Our goal is to put more control into the hands of our business users so that they can respond to the market and our customers in a timely manner. Ultimately, the Progress Sonic ESB and Progress Actional products enable us to build a more robust, scalable and distributed SOA framework, which will empower our business users to bring new insurance offerings to market more quickly.”

West Bend Mutual Insurance will use Sonic ESB and Actional to supplement its existing policy administration system and improve collaboration across its network of independent insurance agents. As a result, insurance agents will be able to conduct business more easily and effectively with West Bend Mutual. Moreover, the newly developed insurance portal will become a critical tool to help them improve their customer retention and acquisition.

Hub Vandervoort, CTO, SOA Products, Progress Software, noted: "All enterprises today are challenged to remain operationally responsive while keeping up with the ever increasing velocity of business. Insurance carriers find it particularly challenging as so many of their back office functions reside on legacy infrastructure. West Bend is a great example of a carrier that realizes how SOA can provide the agility needed to bring new products to market and nurture the agent relationships, all while reusing existing IT investments."

West Bend Mutual Insurance will use Actional products for end-to-end monitoring and visibility of its back office systems to ensure that they are meeting the service levels demanded by agents and customers. Actional products provide cost-effective, high performance, enterprise-scale solutions to the problems of SOA management and governance. The Actional products enable operational and business visibility and policy-based security and control of services and end-to-end business processes in a heterogeneous runtime environment.

Sonic ESB is a messaging-based enterprise service bus that simplifies the integration and flexible re-use of business applications within West Bend Mutual’s SOA infrastructure. The Sonic ESB product helps enterprises transform rigid and fragile point-to-point integration into a reliable architecture that can evolve, scale and extend throughout the enterprise.

Progress Software Corporation

Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS) is a global software company that enables enterprises to be operationally responsive to changing conditions and customer interactions as they occur – to capitalize on new opportunities, drive greater efficiencies and reduce risk. The company offers a comprehensive portfolio of best-in-class infrastructure software spanning event-driven visibility and real-time response, open integration, data access and integration, and application development and deployment – all supporting on-premises and SaaS/Cloud deployments. Progress maximizes the benefits of operational responsiveness while minimizing IT complexity and total cost of ownership. Progress can be reached at www.progress.com or +1-781-280-4000.

Progress, Actional, Sonic ESB and Sonic are trademarks or registered trademarks of Progress Software Corporation or one of its subsidiaries or affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. Any other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.