Progress Software Acquires Actional: an insider's view

IT is full of religious wars and political infighting.  Java vs. .NET, best-of-breed vs. single-source, synchronous vs. asynchronous, centralized vs. decentralized, you name it.  Even the world of SOA is no stranger to these types of battles.  Even still, most (but not all) would agree that at the core of any large-scale SOA initiative are open standards.

But, for an enterprise’s most mission-critical transactions, will they be willing to give up the “one throat to choke” that they have by choosing a single vendor for their end-to-end SOA infrastructure?  This could be argued all day from both sides, but realistically it’s not black or white.  Some will decide that the vendor negotiation leverage they get by having multiple vendors is more important than having “one throat to choke”.  Even within a single organization, as you move from looking at the “most mission-critical” to the next tier of transactions the answer might change.  And, of course, M&A happens, different groups make different choices, etc.  So, most organizations will end up with aspects of both.  One size does not fit all and it never has.

From the Actional side, we certainly focused more (but not exclusively) on being able to support standards-based, multi-vendor SOA environments with fully decentralized responsibility - without loss of functionality and without losing the “big picture” across the SOA, end-to-end.  From the other side, ESB vendors (yes, including Sonic - one of Progress’s business units) focused more (but, again, not exclusively) on providing a single-vendor solution - with all of the associated benefits and drawbacks.

One of the things that was important to me and the rest of the Actional team was that we are able to maintain our neutrality - to work with customers regardless of what vendors they choose for their SOA infrastructure - whether they have no ESB, one or more ESBs, XML appliances, registries, repositories, SOA governance tools, identity managers, or custom and legacy non-XML infrastructures as well.  Personally I would have never supported anything which might leave our customers out in the cold.  The Progress and Sonic teams have been extremely supportive of this - the result is that Actional will be an independent product unit within the organization allowing us to continue to focus on what we do best, and maintain the ability to be agnostic about a customer’s infrastructure choices.

Regardless of our accelerating growth and sales success, for any private software company (especially one like ours, that targets customers using SOA for production and mission critical applications) there’s always a question mark hanging over your head: “What happens to their products if they are acquired?”  Most large acquirers have equally large agendas.  Would Microsoft allow an acquired product line to continue to support Java as a first class citizen?  Would an Oracle or a BEA really be inclined to provide equal (or better!) support for another vendor’s application server (or .for NET)?  Because of this, a customer of a private infrastructure software company has, at best, a 1 in 5 chance that they won’t be left high-and-dry after an acquisition.

I’m happy that this acquisition takes that question off the table for Actional.  Not only will we continue to partner and support what was already the widest coverage of any vendor in our space but, in fact, this will actually accelerate our ability to support even more environments and platforms for our customers.

While we actually weren’t looking to be acquired, the end result is that there are a lot of compelling benefits both for our customers and us.  And, as SOA goes main stream, it allows us to bring our game to the next level.  Circling back to where I began, the result of this acquisition lets Sonic (as a business unit of Progress) offer customers something which is becoming more and more rare in infrastructure software: the ability to choose - without compromise - what approach (or combination thereof) is right for their unique environment.  One size does not need to fit all.

I know I’m very excited about this, as is the rest of the Actional team.

Of course, now that I’m working for a public company, and I’m mentioning it, I’m sure I must need a disclaimer somewhere in here .  Here goes: The thoughts expressed above are my own, blah blah blah, and are not intended to indicate, yawn, blah blah blah, and the company does not sponsor, endorse, blah blah blah, You know the drill.