As you have probably read in today's press and blogs, Progress is going to acquire IONA. This is great news and I welcome my new colleagues from IONA. But what does this mean to our combined customers? While I am not going to directly comment on what the Progress and IONA products will look like going forward; I will review some of the past acquisitions to understand the benefits for everyone involved.
If you look at the Actional acquisition, you will see how these products have evolved over the last couple of years to not only stand on their own and compliment other vendors' stacks, but also how they have enhanced products like the Progress ESB. The same also goes for products from Pantero, where we support full life-cycle of canonical models and the transformations in and out to save our ESB customers many hours of work, but again also provide the same to the application server vendors out there to ensure that we never have to go into XSLT hell again.
As I said earlier I am not going to comment on combining roadmaps, etc., but you can see from the past that not only is Progress Software adding more capability to our SOA infrastructure portfolio by allowing us to help our customers solve larger and more complex problems, but we can equally play as well in combined vendor solutions.