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Progress Software to acquire Iona Technologies


By David Worthington
June 25, 2008 — 
Progress Software bought another SOA specialist this month in what looks like a bit of a shopping spree. After picking up Mindreef last week, the company has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Iona Technologies, a developer of SOA infrastructure software that Progress believes will round out its product portfolio.

The companies jointly announced today that Progress Software has agreed to pay Iona shareholders US$4.05 per share in a transaction with a total equity value of approximately $162 million. The Iona board of directors voted unanimously to approve the deal.

The transaction will be completed in September, provided it meets with the approval of government regulators and Iona shareholders. The company would then become a wholly owned subsidiary of Progress.

“Finally, a SOA infrastructure deal that makes good sense on both sides,” noted Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst with ZapThink. “Iona gets to be part of an organization that has strong sales and marketing, as well as a deep customer base, and Progress gets some of the better technology on the market at what is arguably a fire sale price,” he added.

The deal with Iona comes on the heels of Progress’ buyout of Mindreef, a firm that focused on quality management and testing tools for SOA. Mindreef may be best known for its SOAPscope Server.

Iona may be best known for its Artix product line, which includes the Artix ESB, Artix Connect for WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) and Artix Data Services, as well as other lines, including its versions of open-source testing products, sold under the Fuse brand. Iona also brings to the table a reasonably solid legacy CORBA clientele with its Orbix customers, noted Bloomberg.

The Artix ESB (enterprise service bus), which is a fork of the open-source Fuse ESB, a derivative of Apache ServiceMix, has a distributed architecture that does not rely on a centralized server. Its use of distributed endpoints allows for incremental adoption and the dynamic configuration of services.

It is contrasted by Progress’ Sonic ESB, which takes a more traditional MQ-based approach. The ESB is built upon Progress’ Sonic XQ message queue technology.

“The biggest challenge Progress faces,” Bloomberg posited, “is in explaining the respective benefits of these two arguably competing approaches without cannibalizing their existing customer base.”

Hub Vandervoort, CTO of Progress, demurred, claiming that the designs were in fact complementary and equally useful in different contexts. He said that debating the virtues of smart endpoints versus smart networks was “silly,” tantamount to comparing e-mail to voicemail.

“In practice, both styles are employed at about an equal rate,” he said. Both “are necessary in different contexts. We are ending the madness and allowing customers to choose” for themselves.

He noted that the products may also be used in combination, and that they already interoperate at the messaging and SOA management layers. What’s more, he said, both companies were on the same trajectory—moving to a container-based model based on the Spring Framework and OSGi.

With the acquisition, Progress also gains Artix Connect for WCF, a SOA infrastructure product that mediates between WCF and other applications.

“WCF support and .NET integration was one of the most attractive elements of this acquisition for us; it is a sanctioned offering that adds first class Microsoft integration to our portfolio,” said Vandervoort. Microsoft provided technical assistance to Iona in the design of Artix Connect for WCF.

However, some overlap between the companies’ offerings does exist. For example, Iona’s Artix Data Services has similar technical underpinnings to Progress’ DataXtend data integration products and those products will be brought together, said Vandervoort.

To alleviate customers’ worries, Vandervoort pledged that in such a case, no customer will be left behind and no technology or functionality will be deprecated.

The company’s combined offerings will be positioned against the likes of IBM, Software AG and TIBCO, Bloomberg remarked.


Related Search Term(s): SOA & SaaS, Iona, Progress


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