IONA, one of the original CORBA guys, which has been re-inventing itself for the last few years based on both a proprietary ESB called Artix and with and an open source ESB project called Celtix, has acquired LogicBlaze, the corporate sponsor behind the ApacheMQ MOM. Iona says Artix and Celtix both have pieces of ActiveMQ in them. Conveniently, Celtix was moved from the ObjectWeb OSS community to incubator status under the Apache Software Foundation two months ago.
Financial analysts on this morning's conference cited my estimate of $1M for LogicBlaze's 2005 revenue (mostly subscription revenue) and Iona did not dispute that. In fact, I sense I might have overestimated LogicBlaze's 2005 results given that 2005 was not a full shipping year for LogicBlaze. $1M was probably more representative of LogicBlaze's 2006 results. Iona emphasized that this is about getting into the OSS business model and culture and less about 'buying market share." This is similar conceptually to IBM's acquistion of Gluecode in May 2005.
LogicBlaze co-founders Hiram Chirino, Rob Davies and James Strachan will join IONA's "Open Source business." The three are "key contributors" to Apache ActiveMQ and Apache ServiceMix, which Iona says many IT organizations and ISV's are incorporating in enterprise SOA environments. ISVs in this category include eCube and MySQL. Iona had been a partner because it's idea is to get away from software stacks and back to the original CORBA-heritage distributed view of infrastructure software functionality.
LogicBlaze had "incubated" out of Simula Labs founded by Winston Damarillo, also the founder of Gluecode. Simula was created to commoditze, distribute, and support OSS projects.
LogicBlaze hopes to be better able to deliver enterprise-level support to companies deploying its OSS technologies because of Iona's long experiences supporting mission critical applications, especially in the telecommunications industry and financial services. LogicBlaze's 25 customers are in a similar mix of industries.
The companies also positioned the announcement as another example of how the OSS community side of things is merging with the business side of the IT world. I have written extensively about this phenomenon at my site, itinvestmentresearch.com and recommend particularly the free microanalysis I have done on the World Domination 201 OSS treatise.
Iona also becomes a more direct competitor with Cape Clear, founded by Annrai O'Toole, who was also an Iona founder. ApacheMQ and Celtix also compete directly with all the major IT suppliers offering ESBs (BEA Systems, IBM, Oracle, SAP, SoftwareAG/webMethods)
I should add to my post above that although the Iona acquisition of LogicBlaze is conceptually similar to IBM's acquisition of Gluecode, there is one major difference. IBM was tactily admitting that application servers were becoming a commodity. Iona does not want to make that admission viz a viz enterprise service busses (athough their commoditization is inevitable).