Progress Software

CEP opportunity in Wall Street bust?

Within every disaster there is the obvious downside, but also an unexpected opportunity. For example, in 1906, my grandfather was an unemployed carpenter in Los Angeles. Then the San Francisco fire and earthquake happened. Seeing an opportunity, he moved up north where his skills were suddenly in great demand.

Fast forward to today and the crisis on Wall Street and the plans in Washington to both rescue and better regulate the financial industry. Complex event processing (CEP) has had a lot of initial success in programs for automated stock trading where price and other events trigger buys and sells. But that was in the boom time and now we are in the bust. Wall Street is doing trades at very low volumes.

So does CEP still have a future on Wall Street?

John Bates, whose research at Cambridge University in the U.K. helped pioneer the event-driven technology, told SOA Talk this week that he sees opportunities for CEP in the new era of financial regulation.

CEP is already being used in banking to detect fraud by scanning transactions for events that indicate nefarious activities, noted Bates, who is now vice president of Apama Products, which develops CEP technology for Progress Software.

CEP can also be used for real-time market surveillance to monitor events that might indicate market manipulation and other forbidden practices, he said.

So if CEP is not already on the radar at the U.S. Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and Security and Exchange Commission, it may be soon.

It’s official: IONA is part of Progress

Lost in all the bustle of a news-rich early September was the word that Progress Software closed the deal to acquire IONA Technologies plc.

Some details..

Progress acquired IONA for an aggregate purchase price of approximately $162 million and approximately $107 million net of cash and marketable securities reported on June 30, 2008, which it funded with existing cash resources.

IONA was always among the more interesting companies in the software firmament. It originally came out of computer science academic efforts in Ireland, and was one of the earliest companies to focus on distributed computing. It was one of a handful of upstarts looking to ride the CORBA ORB standard to market. Its star was Orbix.

One of its big early successes was one of technology’ biggest all-time failures. But IONA leveraged what it learned as part of Motorola Iridium Satellite communication effort. [Wikipedia tells us that the satellites and other assets and technology behind Iridium were thought to have cost on the order of $6 billion – but that the bankrupt firm later sold for a mere $25 million.]

Getting to market with an ORB was just step-one for IONA. The company rolled with the Web services and SOA trends; it managed to stay in the game after other independent ORB makers were forgotten, adjusting as market demand changed. It is possible to project that IONA will become an enduring franchise as it comes under the Progress umbrella. Before it is too late, can anyone tell us what ‘IONA’ means?

SOA acquisition week: Progress adds Mindreef

You wouldn’t know the mergers and acquisitions market on Wall Street was in the doldrums if you were just watching Progress Software Corp. this week.

First, Progress snapped up IonaTechnologies Inc., adding Iona’s Artix ESB technology and CORBA legacy customer base. Then on Friday Progress announced that it has also purchased Mindreef Inc., the privately-held vendor of testing and service validation tools for service-oriented architecture (SOA), for an undisclosed price.

The Progress acquisition of Mindreef almost got lost in the hoopla surrounding the purchase of Iona, wrote analyst Joe McKendrick on his ZDNet blog on Thursday. He pointed out the importance of Mindreef’s philosophy of reaching out with its tools to practically everyone involved in SOA development.

“Mindreef’s emphasis has been on enabling professionals from all sides of SOA - architects, developers, and managers - to better collaborate on service design and implementation,” McKendrick wrote.

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.”

 This week’s acquisitions of Iona and Mindreef were a win-win for Progress in Bloomberg’s view.

“Progress is doing a great job of rounding out its SOA offerings by adding Mindreef’s SOA quality solutions to the mix,” the ZapThink analyst said.

In a statement released on Friday regarding the Mindreef acquisition, Progress said it was adding three Mindreef tools to its Actional SOA Management product line:

• SOAPscope Server
• SOAPscope Architect
• SOAPscope Developer

Progress and Mindreef are planning a Webinar in mid-July to further explain how the products will fit together, according to McKendrick.