Progress Software takes further action to bolster service infrastructure proposition
Progress Software today
announced that it has agreed to acquire privately-held Actional for $32 million. Actional is one of the few pure-play web services management vendors left standing, with the likes of Adjoin, Confluent and Talking Blocks (amongst others) having been acquired by the major infrastructure and enterprise management vendors (CA, Oracle via Oblix and HP respectively).
By acquiring Actional, which
merged with Westbridge Technology in October 2004, Progress adds web services management/monitoring and XML security capabilities to bolster the SOA infrastructure proposition of its Sonic enterprise service bus (as did the
end-of-2005 acquisition of NEON Systems for legacy integration). This is essential for Progress if it is to build on the early momentum it has established in largely project/departmental level SOA deployments and move into more strategic, enterprise-scale deployments where it will come up against the likes of BEA, IBM and Oracle with their own ESB propositions. Actional, by virtue of its partnership with Microsoft, also strengthens Sonic's .NET interoperability story.
Progress certainly seems to be getting good value for its $32 million, reflecting the fact that many of the pure play web services/SOA specialists (and more importantly their investors) are struggling to grow their businesses in the face of competition from the major infrastructure and management vendors that are increasingly building or acquiring equivalent capabilities.
Whilst Progress may be getting good value for money, its not going to come without some effort. Although the integration of the management and security capabilities with the Sonic ESB should be comparatively straightforward, significant effort is going to be required to provide customers with a common policy/configuration framework for control of the integrated solution.
I can't help thinking this announcement was welcomed by the team over at
Amberpoint. With yet another (and arguably the most significant) of its pure-play competitors acquired, it leaves more room for Amberpoint to play the best-of-breed card and, perhaps more importantly, to strike partnerships with SOA infrastructure vendors, such as BEA and Tibco, who are competitors to Sonic.
