Progress, BMC Manage Data

Database management vendors The Progress Co. and BMC Software Inc. are each forging strategic partnerships to help keep databases up and running and synchronized like finely tuned Swiss clocks.

Progress, a unit of Progress Software Corp., is joining an application hosting company—NaviSite Inc.—to offer brawny business continuity services. Progress, of Bedford, Mass., is pairing its Fathom product line, which provides proactive database monitoring and data replication, with NaviSites A-Services to offer Progress partners and customers automated, guaranteed, near-real-time failover and data recovery.

Progress officials said that human error was the principal cause of data loss. To combat business downtime and data loss, the two companies will offer a line of managed hosting and application services that will provide near-real-time data recovery for applications that are based on Progress technology.

The services, named Business Continuity Progress Edition, will cover Progress database management and are aimed at small and midsize businesses. Theyll offer three levels: Remote Data Backup, Warm Standby and Hot Standby.

Separately, Houston-based BMC will outfit its namesake SmartDBA data management portfolio with GoldenGate Software Inc.s data synchronization technology, called GoldenGate 7.0. This is intended to give customers end-to-end data management and synchronization with real-time data coordination, database infrastructure monitoring and management.

The need for synchronized environments that offer real-time data coordination is acute, particularly in heterogeneous environments, according to Jasmine Noel, an analyst at JNoel Associates, in Boston. With synchronized systems, queries can grab data in a transactional system that is based on, for example, an Oracle Corp. database. That data can then be synchronized with a decision support system based on, for example, a Microsoft Corp. SQL Server database. “That way, my executives can run all the decisions they want based on real-time data without hurting the availability and performance of the transaction system,” Noel said.