Actional Sells App Integration Business

Now that focus can be laser-sharp because the company has sold its app integration business to middleware provider iWay Software, a subsidiary of Information Builders. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Actional and iWay announced Thursday that iWay will acquire all of the intellectual property, patent rights and products related to Actional's adapter business, which include SOAPswitch, Control Broker and Object Bridge. Executives at iWay said the company will retain Actional staffers critical to the adapter business, including development and support teams now working in Actional's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters and in Montreal, as well as the European sales and support staff now working on-site at SAP, Walldorf, Germany.

With the acquisition, iWay gains integration products aimed at large enterprises trying to weld together proprietary applications. Actional's SOAPswitch software, for example, supports a services-oriented architecture to bridge different integration servers. Control Broker handles architecture-to-architecture transaction requests among proprietary applications. That means the software will set up, for example, realtime messaging between the threading models of SAP R/3 and Siebel Systems' CRM applications.

The acquisition will enable iWay to add development, support and sales to its operations, said company executives. Meanwhile, Actional, whose integration products had been sold primarily through ISVs such as Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, PeopleSoft and SAP, said it can now intensify its focus on the Web services management market.