Event
Summary
As the last step in a long list of acquisitions, IONA Technologies
(NASDAQ: IONA) has purchased Netfish Technologies, a provider
of integrated XML-based B2B process collaboration solutions. The total
consideration of 5.5 million shares of IONA common stock, approximately
$270 million based on IONA's closing price of $49.0625 per share on February
14, 2001, to be accounted for as a purchase. This acquisition, along with
six others including the Sagavista EAI technology from Software
AG (which had recently purchased Saga Systems), completes
IONA's strategy to create a Total Business Integration
solution, a standards-based, end-to-end, e-business platform known
as the IONA Suite. IONA is a pioneer in the ORB and CORBA
(Common Object Request Broker Architecture) market with its flagship Orbix
product. Orbix also includes IONA's Adaptive Runtime Technology (ART),
one of the foundations of the IONA Suite.
Netfish's
flagship product offering is the Netfish XDI Product Suite, a B2B
integration platform that integrates diverse business systems and controls
to manage cross-enterprise information exchange. The XDI Product Suite
automates shared business processes in a workflow-driven, collaborative,
real-time fashion, and provides services such as security, exception handling
and acknowledgements. Netfish's XDI system has been built from the ground
up using open standards such as Java and XML. It is complementary to,
and will be further integrated into the IONA Suite to extend the IONA
Suite's integration and development capabilities across the Internet,
helping organizations create truly integrated trading alliance connections.
"IONA's
customers that are connecting enterprise applications and extending them
to partners and suppliers are managing some of the largest application
integration projects in the world," said Barry Morris, IONA's CEO. "Many
of these customers express the desire to work with one vendor that can
offer a single e-business platform to address all of their needs. The
combination of IONA's and Netfish's products will meet these needs and
establish IONA as the only e-business platform vendor with a single, end-to-end
solution."
Market
Impact
IONA
has been on an acquisition binge for the last two years. Companies and
technologies acquired are:
| Company |
Aquired
Capability |
| EJBHome |
J2EE
Application Server technology and Java expertise |
| Watershed
Technologies |
Portal
Server technology and XML expertise |
| Genesis
Development Corporation |
Consultants
specializing in complex distributed computing |
| Suplicity
technology |
Business
Process Automation |
| Object
Oriented Concepts (OOC) |
CORBA
technology and a highly respected embedded ORB technology (ORBacus).
This acquisition expands IONA's dominance in the CORBA market |
| Technology
from Software AG |
Sagavista
EAI technology, acquired by Software AG with the purchase of Saga
Systems, parent company of Saga Software |
| Netfish
Technologies |
B2B
integration, support for a variety of XML dialects and standards |
The
market for one-stop shopping in the EAI and business integration spaces
is growing exponentially. Many of IONA's competitors are faced with the
make-or-buy decision to allow them to include most of these same technologies
in the product sets. As is becoming obvious with the recent spate of mergers
and acquisitions, (in addition to IONA's moves, Sybase purchased
New Era of Networks, webMethods and Active Software
merged, Auxilium was purchased by Parametric Technology,
and more) it is getting to the point where there will be no more vendors
to absorb, at least not smaller ones. That leaves the remaining vendors
who wish to jump on this particular bandwagon in the unenviable position
of having to write the new code themselves. This could cause them potentially
fatal delays in time-to-market.
User
Recommendations
Customers evaluating EAI and integrated B2B solutions should consider
IONA. Companies should keep in mind that IONA has acquired a large number
of new technologies and employees in a relatively short time, and will
need to expend a lot of effort to complete the absorption.