Well, my intrepid investigative reporter friend, Jeff Schneider, broke the news. We've acquired Mindreef. You can never time these things perfectly, and we didn't want to have news of Mindreef get lost in all the noise around some of the other acquisition stories. So, we had been planning to announce it a bit later. Of course Jeff, never one to let go of a breaking story, couldn't hold off :-)
On the Actional side, we first started partnering with Mindreef back in 2003 or so (long before Actional was acquired by Progress). One of the first things that attracted us to work with Mindreef was the way their products make working with XML and web services easy. As Mindreef expanded their product line they added the ability for a team of SOA stakeholders to collaborate, working together to ensuring that services are delivered successfully - something that still separates Mindreef from any other SOA quality or validation product.
In the SOA space, there's often been a clear dividing line between products that focused on design time concerns and those that focused on runtime concerns. But, SOA isn't so clear cut. When I've built a service that's in production, and you want to design a consumer for that service, is this design time or runtime? What if I've built a consumer that's in production and you want to change your service, is this design time or runtime? Well, it's both really. So why then do we have such a divide between design time and runtime SOA governance products?
By bringing together Mindreef and Actional we're doing what's only natural - removing the artificial dividing line between design time and runtime, addressing the complete SOA lifecycle with technologies that are leaders in both.