Progress Software acquires IONA… and MindReef too

The acquisition of IONA by Progress Software has been pretty widely written about (sometimes ironically). But that’s not the only thing happening in that neck of the wood. Less widely reported (but still covered on ZDNet, here and here) was their acquisition of MindReef. For the inside perspective, head over to Dan Foody’s blog.

This is yet another confirmation of the fact that testing and IT management are getting ever closer together. And for good reasons, if you want to better integrate application management tasks across the application’s lifecycle. Other signs of this were the recent acquisition of the e-Test suite from Empirix by Oracle (driven by Oracle’s application management team, not by the JDev team) and, some time ago, the fact that HP decided to hang on to Mercury’s testing business rather than spinning it off.

From the Progress perspective, the IT management side of course comes from the earlier Actional acquisition (that company itself having previously merged with WestBridge). From my earlier standards work I have worked with people from Actional, WestBridge and MindReef and there is an impressive wealth of SOAP and WS experience in these teams. What remains to be seen is how much management value can be derived from a very “on the wire” (as opposed to deep in the implementation) view of the interaction. Another challenge for SOAP-centric vendors, which might have been a driver for these acquisitions, is realization that SOAP is going to be only one component of the integration landscape, not its foundation. It may be the JMS of B2B integration, but it won’t be its TCP/IP as was once assumed.