Mindreef

By David Linthicum
June 27, 2008

As Joe McKendrick found out last night, it appears that Progress also purchased Mindreef, a testing and validation tool vendor.

"Progress Software's announcement that it had acquired IONA Technologies earlier this week was big news, but the vendor didn't stop there. In another acquisition that almost seems to have slipped under the radar, Progress also has acquired Mindreef, provider of SOA service validation and testing tools, as announced here at the Mindreef Website. (It's not clear exactly when the acquisition actually took place.)"

(Full disclosure: Mindreef was a client of mine at the Linthicum Group, and at ZapThink.)

Clearly, Progress is sweeping up the smaller players in the SOA space and the acquisition of Mindreef is just the next step. Mindreef has good tools and smart guys, so I suspect they will have a new play now with some more resources.

The trick, as with the Iona acquisition, is getting this technology delivered within an overall strategy. The lack of a core strategy is where these acquisitions fall down, typically. Companies attempt to run them as separate business units and with no common strategy, and thus end users become confused, frustrated, and eventually leave. I've seen this time and time again in the SOA space and within the software industry in general.

So, how should Progress proceed?

First, announce what their intentions are with the newly acquired stack -- what they will keep and how they will leverage the technology in the context of the emerging market and within the concept of SOA.

Second, make sure to lock up the key players. During many acquisitions they don't provide an incentive for the smarter guys to stay and they leave to start new ventures. ...

View Full Article

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."  ...

View Full Article

Mindreef and Iona Technologies are expected to bolster Progress' portfolio which includes management tools and business process management software.

By Antone Gonsalves
June 27, 2008

Progress Software on Friday said it has acquired Mindreef, a maker of software tools for implementing service-oriented architectures. The acquisition was the second announced by Progress in as many days.

In an FAQ page explaining the purchase, Mindreef said support and services would continue uninterrupted, and the company was working with Progress in aligning product direction and roadmaps. There were no plans to eliminate products, Mindreef said.

Progress, which announced plans on Wednesday to buy Iona Technologies for $162 million, appears to be on a buying spree to expand its SOA product offerings. Iona is a data integration software maker that was an early implementer of CORBA standards from the Object Management Group, producing one of the first and most successful object request brokers, Orbix. The company later moved into another stage of enterprise integration, the enterprise service bus.

Mindreef's SOAPscope brand of products enables business analysts, architects, application developers, testers, and operations and support staff to collaborate in building, deploying and maintaining software for an SOA. The company claims to have more than 3,000 customers at more than 1,200 organizations worldwide, including 40 of the Fortune 100 customers.

Mindreef said it would be integrated into Progress and adopt that company's name. The Mindreef product name, however, was expected to remain for most products, which would be sold separately from other Progress software.

Mindreef's core competency in SOA quality and validation tools is expected to be particularly useful to Progress's stated focus of providing technology to ensure quality of service in SOA environments, Mindreef said. Progress plans to release details of the overall strategy behind the acquisition in mid-July. ...

View Full Article

By Rich Seeley
June 27, 2008

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. ...

View Full Article