IONA
SOA acquisition week: Progress adds Mindreef
Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst, ZapThink LLC., who earlier in the week said the Iona deal made good sense for Progress, also saw value in the Mindreef acquisition.
“Both the Mindreef and IONA deals are great moves for Progress,” Bloomberg said. “Governance, quality, and management are more important to SOA success than middleware is, so it’s a great sign that they’re adding SOA quality to the mix.”
Change management is a crucial piece of SOA that appears to be missing in many vendor offerings, the ZapThink analyst noted.
“After all, unless you enable broad-based service consumption and composition in environments of continual change, which is what SOA is all about, you can’t have effective SOA. It’s surprising that more SOA infrastructure companies haven’t made a deeper investment in SOA governance, quality, and management solutions, since they will rapidly realize that the success of their SOA initiatives depend on successfully addressing those issues.”
Read more at: SearchSOASOA synergy? Progress, Iona mix different ESB models
“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.
Read more at: SearchSOAProgress Buys Iona for SOA Wares
“Finally, a SOA infrastructure deal that makes good sense on both sides,” Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with the SOA consultancy Zapthink, said via e-mail Wednesday. “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.”
Read more at: PC WorldProgress Software to acquire Iona Technologies
“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.
Read more at: SD TimesIs open source remaking the ESB market?
Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC, said both pure play vendors suffered from a failure to gain traction for their ESB in the SOA marketplace.
“Iona and Cape Clear are clearly examples of a broader consolidation trend in the industry,” he said, “but in their particular cases, it’s more examples of better technology that both vendors were unable to market and sell effectively enough to grow their business sufficiently.”
Read more at: SearchSOAThe Next SOA Vendor to Be Acquired!
This blog asks “Who are the SOA centric companies that have not yet been acquired?” as if they are the ugly ducklings of the SOA dating game no one wants to marry.
Joe McKendrick also writes about this subject in his April 19, 2007 dated blog entry entitled “The incredible shrinking SOA vendor pool: good or bad?” referring to David Linthicum’s opinions: “Dave Linthicum, who has been involved in plenty of IT vendor acquisitions, has been keeping tabs on the churning SOA vendor space, and estimates that anywhere between three to four dozen SOA specialty vendors have been acquired in just the last couple of years. Isn’t that a good thing? For the investors in these companies, yes. But for SOA innovation, no, Dave says. In fact, we may be losing our competitive edge in SOA as a result.”
Read more at: Sys-ConVordel 3rd Annual SOA Security Conference focuses on practical control of SOA
Vordel will play host this October in Dublin to many of the industry’s leading analysts, vendors, systems integrators and end user organizations at its 3rd annual SOA Security user conference. Focusing on the theme of Practical Control of the SOA, the event offers attendees an excellent mix of strategic enterprise architecture advice coupled with practical with hands on training. Keynote presentations will include Sean Baker of Iona, Jason Bloomberg from ZapThink, David Yeates at EBS Building Society, Paddy Keenan Chief Architect with Atos Origin, Daniel Mothersdale of nCipher and many others.
Read more at: Vordel Press ReleaseSOA 2007: Adoption steady, but tech squabbles exist
Some good questions and bad solutions
Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst, ZapThink LLC
Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst, ZapThink LLC Encouraging: Companies are starting to invest more in architecture: methodology, people, organizational change, and design. There’s more emphasis now on governance, quality and management. Discouraging: Many end-users are being misled with regards to proper SOA adoption – focusing them more on implementing new infrastructure and not as much on building well-architected services. Many CIOs still don’t get the reason for SOA and are stubbornly resisting SOA adoption. Read more at: SearchWebServices
SOA And AJAX Power Panel
Commentators Outline the Present and Future of SOA and AJAX
With Jason Bloomberg as guest.
Read more at: SYS-CON.TVAJAX On the Minds of Power Bloggers on SYS-CON.TV
What was originally conceived as a SOA Bloggers Power Panel turned into a wide-ranging discussion that involved numerous front-end, AJAX-based issues, in a dynamic discussion produced by SYS-CON.TV at the Reuters Studio overlooking Times Square in New York.
Panel members included SOA World Editor-in-Chief Sean Rhody, ColdFusion Developer’s Journal Editor-in-Chief Simon Horwith, noted open-source blogger and IONA Technologies executive Debbie Moynihan, Nexaweb Founder and CTO Coach Wei–all well-known SYS-CON bloggers–and noted indusry commentator and analyst Jason Bloomberg of ZapThink. The panel was moderated by SYS-CON.TV founder and host Roger Strukhoff.
Bloomberg (pictured), whose company has been named media sponsor of SYS-CON’s upcoming SOA World 2007 Conference & Expo, confirmed that oftentimes SOA discussions wander into AJAX territory and vice versa. Horwith, who has been working with ColdFusion for 12 years, noted that he gets involved with a lot of federal government business, and that government clients are now very serious about their AJAX strategies, as usability and accessibility are two of their prime Read more at: SYS-CONFREE POSTERS
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