Iona picks up open source firm

10-04-2007

by Maxim Kelly

Software giant Iona has continued its acquisition spree with the purchase of LogicBlaze on Tuesday.

LogicBlaze provides business integration solutions based on open source technologies. In a statement, Iona said its latest acquisition is based on the assumption that its future service oriented architecture (SOA) deployments will include multiple technologies, including many from the open source community.

Iona did not disclose a value for the all-cash transaction, but confirmed that LogicBlaze cofounders Hiram Chirino, Rob Davies and James Strachan will join Iona's open source business. No mention was made of fellow co-founder, LogicBlaze chief executive and tech entrepreneur Winston Damarillo.

Dublin-headquartered Iona recently purchased data management firm C24 in a similar cash deal. It referred to that transaction as a 'technology and expertise acquisition'.

Iona chief executive Peter Zotto seems to be following the same strategy with LogicBlaze as the firm's directors are well regarded in software development circles for their Java-based Apache enterprise messaging software.

"LogicBlaze brings proven open source expertise to Iona to further advance our leadership in delivering open source SOA infrastructure to our customers," said Zotto.

"In a 'flat world,' open source communities are providing a new level of creativity to support the trend toward SOA. Iona is committed to combining the innovation of open source with innovation from Iona and its partners to deliver solutions based on Iona's unique, distributed approach to SOA."

LogicBlaze director Hiram Chirino said businesses were now coming to fully appreciate the value of community driven open source software, the underlying code for which is usually released into the public domain allowing programmers to tinker with it if they wish.

"Open source is rapidly becoming more mainstream as customers become better educated and are better able to understand the unique value proposition of using open source software in their enterprise IT deployments, including SOA," said Chirino. "The combination of Iona and LogicBlaze offers our customers even greater confidence that the open source technologies on which they build their SOA infrastructure are backed by true leaders in the open source community and the software industry."

Iona was spun-out of Trinity College, Dublin's ICT department in 1991. It employs 347 people worldwide, with approximately 115 staff employed at the firm's headquarters in Ireland. The company is expected to announce revenues of around USD17 million later this month.