Progress Software Buying Iona Technologies In SOA Play

Progress, based in Bedford, Mass., is a major supplier of application infrastructure software for building, deploying and managing business applications. It's SOA Portfolio product line, including the Actional Web services management toolset, is used by customers to assemble and manage SOA system infrastructure. Dublin, Ireland-based Iona offers the Artix line of application integration tools for SOA and the FUSE open-source SOA integration components.

"This is something of a double-down in the SOA architecture infrastructure space," said Hub Vandervoort, CTO of SOA infrastructure products at Progress. The two companies already have a number of technology relationships: Iona resells Progress's SonicMQ messaging system, for example, and was considering reselling Actional.

Progress also gains ownership of Iona's high-volume transaction processing software that's popular among financial service and trading companies. That product competes with transaction processing systems from IBM and BEA Systems -- now owned by Oracle.

Progress and Iona rely heavily on sales to OEMs, ISVs and resellers. "Sales through ISVs, OEMs and the technology supply chain is another point of commonality," Vandervoort said. And Progress and Iona also have some overlap in their customer bases: Credit Suisse First Boston and AT&T have software from both vendors running in different parts of their organizations.

Progress is acquiring Iona for $4.05 per share in cash, making the deal worth approximately $162 million (approximately $106 million net of cash). The acquisition has been approved by Iona's board of directors, but still requires approval by the company's shareholders, the Irish High Court and U.S. regulatory authorities. Once the deal is completed in September Iona will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Progress.