Progress Software on Friday said it has acquired Mindreef, a maker of software tools for implementing service-oriented architectures. The acquisition was the second announced by Progress in as many days.

In an FAQ page explaining the purchase, Mindreef said support and services would continue uninterrupted, and the company was working with Progress in aligning product direction and roadmaps. There were no plans to eliminate products, Mindreef said.

Progress, which announced plans on Wednesday to buy Iona Technologies for $162 million, appears to be on a buying spree to expand its SOA product offerings. Iona is a data integration software maker that was an early implementer of CORBA standards from the Object Management Group, producing one of the first and most successful object request brokers, Orbix. The company later moved into another stage of enterprise integration, the enterprise service bus.

Mindreef's SOAPscope brand of products enables business analysts, architects, application developers, testers, and operations and support staff to collaborate in building, deploying and maintaining software for an SOA. The company claims to have more than 3,000 customers at more than 1,200 organizations worldwide, including 40 of the Fortune 100 customers.

Mindreef said it would be integrated into Progress and adopt that company's name. The Mindreef product name, however, was expected to remain for most products, which would be sold separately from other Progress software.

Mindreef's core competency in SOA quality and validation tools is expected to be particularly useful to Progress's stated focus of providing technology to ensure quality of service in SOA environments, Mindreef said. Progress plans to release details of the overall strategy behind the acquisition in mid-July.

Progress' SOA portfolio includes the Sonic enterprise service bus, management tools, a registry/repository, business process management and mainframe integration software. The company also has tools for complex event processing, data interoperability and enterprise messaging.

The Mindreef acquisition is complete. The Iona transaction is expected to close in September.