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IT Business Edge: Progress Software Buys Again - This Time, It’s Mindreef |
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By Loraine Lawson July 1, 2008 Man, you can’t go away for a weekend without some SOA vendor buying some other SOA guy out. If you read Friday’s post, you saw Progress made headlines last week for a $162 million buyout deal of Iona Technologies. What Progress managed to slip under the radar, however, was the fact it finalized the acquisition of Mindreef last week as well.
Progress fessed up yesterday that it wanted to hold off on the announcement, apparently spilled the beans to Jeff Schneider of consultancy MomentumSI late last week. By yesterday, it was like a wildfire among the SOA blog-o-sphere, which, really, isn’t that big, but you get the idea: It’s a pretty big announcement, especially in light of the Iona Technology deal, which is expected to be finalized in September. The Mindreef acquisition, however, is a done deal and Mindreef will be absorbed into Progress Software. InformationWeek reports the Mindreef product name is expected to remain for most products, and it will be sold separately from other Progress software. Progress is best known for its Sonic enterprise service bus. Mindreef makes the SOAPscope SOA products and is basically known as a SOA quality assurance, or governance, vendor. According to the article, Mindreef reassured its 3,000 customers that they will offer uninterrupted services and support in an online FAQ. And may I just say, kudos to Mindreef for publishing the FAQ. That was a smart move. If more companies would do that, there’d be a lot less worry and speculation over what deals like this mean for client organizations. So far, pundits and analysts seem to like the acquisition. Ronald Schmelzer, who is darn tired of people equating SOA with Web services integration, told Network World the deal sends the right message about how SOA does not mean Web services integration or ESBs (enterprise service buses), but rather “… is about changing the way we think of and consume IT capabilities, and to do so in an environment of high quality requires a robust platform.” Here are links to what other analysts said: * Analyst and ZD Net columnist, Dana Gardner, said the deal “made sense.” * SOA expert and StrikeIron CEO David Linthicum thought it was a smart move, but warned it would be tricky to get “this technology delivered within an overall strategy.” * ZD Net SOA columnist and technology author and consultant Joe McKendrick pointed out the two recent deals show “…Progress is clearly aiming to develop and offer an end-to-end suite of SOA products — from integration to management.” View Full Article |
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Progress Software Corporation Acquires Mindreef Inc. |
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Actional® and Mindreef® SOA Management Products Together First to Address the Entire SOA Lifecycle with Best-in-Class SOA Quality, Validation, and Runtime GovernanceBEDFORD, Mass.--June 30, 2008--(BUSINESS WIRE)- -Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS), a global supplier of application infrastructure software used to develop, deploy, integrate and manage business applications today announced the completion of the acquisition of privately-owned Mindreef, Inc., the SOA Quality Company. Mindreef develops and markets the award-winning Mindreef® SOAPscope® products, which enable different IT users such as business analysts, system architects, application developers, testers, operations and support staff to build, deploy, and maintain better software at each phase of an SOA, Web service or composite application development lifecycle. With the combination of Actional and SOAPscope, Progress is the first and only company to address the entire SOA lifecycle with best-in-class SOA quality and validation capabilities and industry-leading runtime governance capabilities, ensuring the success of SOA deployments. The Mindreef SOAPscope product family comprises SOAPscope Server, SOAPscope Architect, SOAPscope Tester, and SOAPscope Developer and joins the Progress® Actional® SOA Management product family that provides policy-based visibility, security, and control for services, middleware, and business processes. This acquisition continues Progress’ expansion of its best-in-class SOA Portfolio and strengthens the company’s position as a leader in independent, standards-based, heterogeneous, distributed SOA infrastructure. Dan Foody, vice president, Actional Products, Progress Software, commented: “Mindreef has created one of the most successful SOA quality and validation products, used by more than 3,000 customers, with core strengths in the pre-production phases of the SOA lifecycle. Progress Actional SOA Management products, in contrast, have core strengths in the production phase, where independent industry analysts Gartner and Forrester Research consider Actional products to be leaders. With more than 100 Mindreef customers added each month and with Actional growing at more than 100%, by bringing these products lines together Progress addresses the complete SOA lifecycle with the strongest offering for every lifecycle phase.” Frank Grossman, co-founder and President of Mindreef, Inc., noted: “The quality and validation capabilities within the Mindreef products seamlessly enhance the visibility and management features available from the Actional SOA Management products, resulting in a synergy that can help enterprises achieve greater success with the services they deliver. This synergy will help IT managers more effectively detect and avoid issues, including mismatches in expectations between service consumers and service providers, earlier in the service lifecycle, thus reducing the risk of these being discovered during either integration testing or the production phase, when such issues can be potentially more costly to the organization.” Even when issues do arise in production, the combination of Actional and SOAPscope products will allow application support teams to detect business exceptions and collaborate with other stakeholders to analyze the cause, repair the issues, and resubmit messages so that the business transactions are completed successfully. View Full Press Release and FAQ Here |
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IDG News/Network World: Progress Makes Another SOA Buy |
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By Chris Kanaracus, DG News Service
June 27, 2008
Application infrastructure vendor Progress Software has purchased Mindreef, a Hollis, New Hampshire, maker of tools for testing SOAs (service oriented architectures). Terms of the deal were not disclosed. e Mindreef news follows Progress' announcement earlier this week that it plans to buy fellow SOA vendor Iona Technologies.
There will be no interruption to support and service for existing Mindreef customers, and there are no plans at this time to shelve any products, according to the site. The company plans to hold a Webcast in mid-July to explain the strategy behind the deal to its client base. Progress executive said Mindreef's catalog is complementary to its own Actional series of SOA management tools.
"Mindreef has been very successful in the [SOA testing] tools and infrastructure for people in the pre-production stage," said Dan Foody, vice president of Actional products at Progress. "Actional has focused more on the production and deployment phases."
Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with the SOA consultancy ZapThink, called the deal "a huge, positive move for Progress" via e-mail. Not only does it bolster their ability to deliver high-quality SOA, but it also helps to reinforce the message that SOA is not just about Web services integration and ESBs [enterprise service buses]," he wrote. "SOA is about changing the way we think of and consume IT capabilities, and to do so in an environment of high quality requires a robust platform." ...
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Progress Software Acquires Mindreef |
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 Mindreef, Inc. has been acquired by Progress Software Corporation, a world-leading independent developer of software for transforming mission-critical business operations. |
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Mindreef Named to the SD Times 100 for Third Consecutive Year |
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Receives Top Honors in Test & QA and Middleware Categories Hollis, NH – June 10, 2008 – Mindreef®, Inc., The SOA Quality Company™, today announced that for the third consecutive year it has been named to Software Development Times Magazine’s annual “SD Times 100” list. The 6th annual SD Times 100 recognizes the big influencers and innovators across the software development industry over the past calendar year. The magazine reaches more than 60,000 subscribers in 131 countries. Mindreef has been named to the SD Times 100 in the “Middleware” and “Test and QA” categories along with industry leaders that include BEA, IBM, HP and CA. According to the editors of SD Times, winners in these categories “provide the best tools and systems for keeping track of [web] services” and are helping software become “more reliable and easier to fix.” A compete list of categories and winners can be found at http://www.bzmedia.com/sdtimes100. "The software development industry is led by innovation," said Alan Zeichick, editorial director of BZ Media's SD Times. "When choosing the 2008 SD Times 100, we carefully considered each organization's products and services, reputation with development managers, and the new ideas and thought leadership that it has brought to the industry. Thanks to the SD Times 100 winners like Mindreef, the art and science of software development continues to advance at a rapid pace." “Mindreef is honored to be recognized as a leader in the software industry by the editors of SD Times,” said Frank Grossman, president and CTO of Mindreef. “This is the third year in a row we’ve been named to the SD Times 100 list – underscoring our continued commitment to deliver industry leading solutions for Web services and SOA quality, compliance, collaboration and performance.” The Mindreef SOAPscope Server™ product family – including SOAPscope Server, SOAPscope Architect™, SOAPscope Tester™ and SOAPscope Developer™ – provides collaborative quality processes that range from defining organizational SOA policies, to Web services testing, diagnosis and simulation, as well as user support. This ensures that every member of a project team can deliver quality SOAs and services in an agile development lifecycle, by delivering better software at each phase. Mindreef products are available for purchase or no-risk evaluation at: www.mindreef.com. About Mindreef
Mindreef, Inc., The SOA Quality Company, provides integrated software solutions that help organizations ensure trust, confidence and agility in their quality-driven SOA deployments. The Mindreef award-winning SOAPscope Server™ product family helps business analysts, architects, application developers, testers, operations and support staff to ensure quality, compliance and performance as they define, implement, integrate, test and deploy Web services and composite applications. Teams at Wachovia, Fidelity National Financial, Charles Schwab, IBM, Valero Energy and more than 3,000 customers at over 1,200 organizations worldwide – including 40 of the Fortune 100 – use Mindreef SOAPscope Server products to successfully build, test and maintain high-quality Web services and SOAs. Mindreef is a private company, backed by Kodiak Venture Partners. For more information, visit www.mindreef.com. # # # |
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