iWay Software Tuesday moved to expand its already broad software adapter portfolio by acquiring the adapter operations of Actional for an undisclosed cash sum.
New York-based iWay, owned by business intelligence software company
Information Builders, said it would purchase the Mountain View, Calif.’s adapter division as Actional bears down in the burgeoning Web services management market where it competes with several startups.
Meanwhile iWay, largely viewed as the leading provider of software adapters that help make disparate software infrastructure work together, aims to
expand its software operations by adding development, support, and sales
capacity.
According to iWay President John G. Senor, III,
iWay will acquire Actional’s intellectual property such as SOAPswitch,
Actional Control Broker, and Object Bridge technologies. The agreement
encompasses all associated adapter products and patent rights, as well as
the right to all existing Actional adapter licensing agreements with
customers and business partners.
Senor told internetnews.com 22 employees will also join iWay from
Actional. This includes development and support teams in Montreal in Canada and Mountain View, Calif., as well as European sales and support staff
located on the SAP campus in Waldorf, Germany. This is important because
iWay enjoys a deep partnership with SAP, providing adapters for the NetWeaver application platform.
Senor also said the purchase should provide greater synergy with Microsoft,
which happens to be one of iWay’s and Actional’s biggest customers. iWay has
provided adapters for Microsoft BizTalk Server. With Actional technology on
board, iWay hopes to provide even more value to Microsoft, and by extension,
earn more business from the software giant.
iWay competes with Neon Systems and IBM to some degree, but IBM also happens
to purchase adapters for its DB2 database products and WebSphere Application
Server and the former MQSeries products, WebSphere MQ and WebSphere MQ
Integrator (WMQI). Senor said building up its assets is key at a time when
the integration software market is struggling.
“Many integration leaders are experiencing flat to down earnings, if you
look at webMethods, Tibco and some of the others,” Senor said. “So, this
market presents a very significant challenge. But iWay enjoyed better than a
20 percent compound growth rate for 2003 while most everyone else was down.
iWay is the only vendor in the market the does the entire breadth of
adapters with the capability to offer more than 250 data, application,
transaction, and technology integration adapters. iWay is the one-stop
shop.”
