“These product lines only have about a 10 percent overlap,” said Hub Vandervoort, CTO SOA Infrastructure Products at Progress, explaining the acquisition after it was announced Wednesday. He described the Progress and Iona product lines as 90 percent synergistic.

That argument held some weight with Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC.

“It’s nice to finally see an SOA infrastructure deal that makes good sense on both sides,” Bloomberg said. “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 higher quality technology on the market at what is arguably a fire sale price.”

The “fire sale price,” in Bloomberg’s opinion refers to the announced terms of the deal in which Progress is buying Iona for $4.05 per share in cash, which it said “represents a total equity value of approximately $162 million.”

Offering a brief financial history lesson, Bloomberg said: “True, no one would expect Iona to go for anything like their dot.com bubble high of almost $100 per share, but even so, their $4.05 per share deal price is still less than half their post-bubble high of around $8.60 reached in the spring of 2004.”

The $4.05 per share offer was unanimously approved by Iona’s board of directors, according to the Progress announcement, which noted that it was a 16 percent more than the average share price during the six months prior to Feb. 8, when Iona first announced that it was talking to a potential buyer.

Beyond the deal maker issues, Bloomberg supported Vandervoort’s contention that the two companies’ enterprise service bus products, Iona’s Artix ESB and the Sonic ESB Progress acquired in early 2006, are more complementary than competitive. The ZapThink analyst also noted that Iona also provides CORBA technology that pre-dates the SOA approach.

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