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Waltham, MA, March 4, 2008 – Active Endpoints, Inc. ( www.activevos.com ), inventor of visual orchestration systems (VOS), today announced the general availability of ActiveVOSTM 5.0. ActiveVOS 5.0 revolutionizes the design, development, testing, deployment and maintenance of composite applications for line of business developer project teams who are struggling to balance the technological challenges of using services-based technologies with the business need to be productive and compatible with existing applications and standards. ActiveVOS 5.0 changes the playing field for SOA-based application development. Thanks to a unique combination of support for standards, a visual development environment, scalable servers, integrated scenario testing and remote debugging capabilities, composite application developers have never before had such an attractive, compatible way to rapidly develop, deploy and maintain services-based business applications. ActiveVOS also breaks new ground in pricing, putting to rest the idea that creating SOA-based applications is expensive.

The right way to develop services-based applications Building on the company’s previous success with OEM customers, ActiveVOS 5.0 offers tried-and-true performance and reliability to CIOs and line-of-business managers while adding dozens of new features, all targeted at making it possible to develop service orchestrations in ways never before possible. Some of the innovations in ActiveVOS 5.0 include:

• Support for human tasks. Integrating long-running human tasks into an application requires that the system maintains application state over periods that can last weeks or months, a major technological challenge. In ActiveVOS 5.0, support for these kinds of complex, long-running transactions is completely integrated into the system and is achieved using the WS-BPEL Extension for People (BPEL4People) and WS-Human Task open specifications. ActiveVOS 5.0 support for standards-based workflow includes visual creation of human tasks, the ability to create logical groups of people to protect the application from role changes and a customizable task inbox that people can access to process work. ActiveVOS 5.0 delivers a significant business benefit by freeing critical business workflow and processes from expensive, closed and proprietary workflow engines.

• Scenario testing and remote debugging. ActiveVOS 5.0 fundamentally and completely solves a major pain experienced by all developers: the question of how to adequately test loosely-coupled, message-based applications. ActiveVOS 5.0 includes a new BUnit (or “BPEL unit test”) function, which allows developers to simulate the entire orchestration offline, including the ability to insert sample data into the application. A BUnit can be created by simply recording a simulation in the ActiveVOS 5.0 Designer.

• Multiple BUnits can be combined into BSuites, or collections of smaller simulations, to build up entire test suites. Once deployed into a production environment, ActiveVOS 5.0 delivers precisely the same experience for testing and debugging a production orchestration as it does for an application in development. Remote debugging includes the ability to inspect and/or alter message input and output, dynamically change endpoint references and alter people assignments in the application.

• Greater compatibility. ActiveVOS 5.0 extends orchestrations to legacy and mainframe services by offering support for the Java Message Service (JMS). Additionally, services using Representational State Transfer (REST) techniques can be easily orchestrated with other applications. ActiveVOS 5.0 is also compatible with leading SOA governanceapplications, to ensure greater productivity in managing services from cradle to grave.

• Ease of use enhancements. ActiveVOS 5.0 offers a range of improvements, all targeted at ensuring the orchestration developer’s productivity. A new Project Deployment Descriptor Editor simplifies preparation of the application for production. The Project Explorer collects into a single pane of the EclipseTM IDE all of the resources necessary to manage an orchestration. An embedded ApacheTM TomcatTM server can be controlled directly from the Eclipse environment. Developers can now specify alternate endpoints for an application should one endpoint become unavailable, making applications both self-healing and more reliable. Catalogued service references, including Web Services Definitions Language (WSDL) and schema files, are now saved as part of the project, allowing use of ActiveVOS 5.0’s innovative testing capabilities offline.

Packaging, pricing and availability
ActiveVOS 5.0 shatters the price barrier-to-entry for developers and line-of-business project teams and removes technology costs from decisions to modernize applications. ActiveVOS 5.0 is available in two editions:

• ActiveVOS 5.0 Professional Edition. Professional Edition is the visual orchestration system for developers. Professional Edition subscription lists for $995 per year for each CPU socket. The one year subscription to ActiveVOS 5.0 Professional Edition includes Standard Support and maintenance. Standard Support includes one named contact and two support incidents per year via the ActiveVOS support forums.

• ActiveVOS 5.0 Enterprise Edition. Enterprise Edition includes the proven, scalable ActiveVOS engine and server and expands Professional Edition’s deployment support to include IBM® WebSphere®, RedHat® JBoss® and BEA® WebLogic® application servers, with support for clustering, high-availability and failover. Enterprise Edition offers perpetual license options at $10,000 per physical CPU socket for production use. In addition, advanced support options such as Developer Assist (including five named contacts and unlimited incidents) are available with ActiveVOS Enterprise Edition.

ActiveVOS 5.0 will be available on March 5, 2008. Developers, project managers and enterprise architects are invited to visit the company’s new website at http://www.activevos.com to view a large amount of newly developed content devoted to visual orchestration systems and their promise to eliminate barriers to advanced application development. Visitors to the website are also invited to watch a web demonstration of ActiveVOS 5.0.

About Active Endpoints, Inc.
Active Endpoints (www.activevos.com) is a leading developer of visual orchestration systems. VOS empowers line of business project teams to crea te applications using services and industry standards, making their businesses more agile and effective. Active Endpoints’ ActiveVOS promotes mass adoption of SOA-enabled applications by focusing on accelerating project delivery time with a standards-based, easy to use system. Active Endpoints is headquartered in Waltham, MA with development facilities in Shelton, CT.