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: SearchSOA

SOA 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: SearchSOA

Progress 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 World

Progress 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 Times

Practical SOA: Insurance

Presentations from ZapThink’s Practical SOA for Insurance event on May 16, 2008. Presented as a 232-slide PowerPoint in pdf format (large file). Agenda as follows:

Building Data-Rich SOBAs in a Heterogeneous Environment

The importance of the Data Services Layer for SOA, Service-Oriented Business Applications (SOBAs), and Service Consumers. Also explores the notion of Enterprise Mashups from the data perspective.

Delivered at DataDirect’s Architect Tutorial series in April – May, 2008.

34-slide PowerPoint in pdf format.

Practical SOA London

All of the presentations from ZapThink’s Practical SOA event in London, UK on April 25, 2008.

The presentations include the following:

Welcome & World-Wide SOA Adoption Trends in 2008, Presenter: Jason Bloomberg, Managing Partner, ZapThink, LLC

Case Study in SOA: GE Capital Solutions, Presenter: Nicolas Farges, Technical Architect, GE Capital Solutions Europe.

Case Study in SOA: ABN Amro – Achieving Enterprise Scale SOA, Presenter: Roy Varughese, Chief Architect, ABN AMRO (Global Clients)

Enterprise SOA patterns, Presenter: Francois Lascelles, Director of Client Solutions, Layer 7 Technologies

A Complete Strategy for Testing Web services, Presenter: Rix Groenboom, Parasoft

Redefining the Economics of Mainframe SOA, Presenter: David Little, Senior Technical Consultant (Shadow Products), DataDirect

Recession-Proofing your Company with SOA, Presenter: Jason Bloomberg, Managing Partner, Zapthink

251-slide PowerPoint in pdf format (large file).

SOA data services using a common data model

The Progress product provides the kind of agility for managing data that SOA provides for business applications, said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with Zapthink LLC.

“The SOA challenge that DataXtend addresses is in building and supporting the data services layer, which abstracts the underlying data in order to provide flexibility to the business services above the layer,” Bloomberg said. “In essence, DataXtend brings agility to an enterprise’s data in a way that complements and supports the agility that SOA already provides to business processes.”

Read more at: SearchSOA

ZapThink Podcast: Practical SOA : New York / New Jersey – Finance, Pharma, Media, Governance, Quality, and Management Sneak Peek

Special ZapThink “Sneak Preview” Podcast for January 8, 2008 features:

Ron Schmelzer, Managing Partner, ZapThink

Ben Moreland, Director, Foundation Services, The Hartford

Mike Kavis, Executive Director, Architecture, Catalina Marketing

Jim Mackay, CMO, iTKO

Al Aghili, CTO and Founder, Managed Methods

Martin Milani, CTO, Tidal Software

Dan Finerty, Director, Product Marketing, DataDirect

Listen to this Podcast and you will get a “Sneak Peek” at what all the presenters will be speaking about at our Practical SOA: New York / New Jersey – Finance, Pharma, Media, Governance, Quality, and Management event in Newark, New Jersey, on March 25, 2008.

Overcoming SOA Insecurity

SOA allows IT organizations to externalize identity management outside of the application, said ZapThink analyst Ron Schmelzer. That eases the problem, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution, he noted. “You have to specify details for each user or service,” he said, offering an example of an online merchant. “You can see this [inventory] data, but you can’t get at the credit card authorization service.”

A key thing to check for is how the SOA is using third-party components, and whether those components are functioning properly, said ZapThink’s Schmelzer. “Take down one key service, [and] you can take down [the entire app],” he noted. “Can you imagine what would happen if Google Maps went down? How many applications would I kill?” In the past, that would have been a problem for only Google, he noted, but with SOA, the impact is so much wider. “The greatest benefit of SOA–[the ability to share services]–is also the greatest problem of SOA.”

Read more at: SD Times