Iona Technologies Buys Open-Source Software Company

Iona Technologies, a supplier of software to build services-oriented architectures, has purchased an open-source company specializing in an SOA stack, LogicBlaze. No price for the acquisition was disclosed.

LogicBlaze produced the Fuse set of integrated, open-source software as a basis for building services. It included the Liferay portal, the Apache ServiceMix enterprise service bus, and other components.

It was only two years ago that LogicBlaze's founder, Winston Damarillo, sold another open-source company, Gluecode, to IBM. Gluecode had assembled a middleware stack that included the Apache Software Foundation's Geronimo application server, and IBM has since become a prime mover of the Geronimo project.

Iona offers a commercial registry and repository for SOA services, called Artix, and an open-source enterprise service bus, Celtix. It's also a long time supplier of the Orbix object request broker for building object-oriented systems. Orbix is embedded in many telecommunications switches and online trading systems.

Damarillo is a native of the Phillipines who sold stock he had earned while at Intel in order to found Gluecode. He was assembling office furniture on Gluecode's first day of operation, the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when he learned that the World Trade Center in New York had been destroyed in an attack. The resulting downturn in the technology market proved a boon for a low initial cost, middleware stack like Gluecode's. Damarillo is a veteran of Intel's venture capital unit.

The LogicBlaze purchase follows several other acquisitions of open-source companies, such as Oracle's buying Sleepycat for its embeddable BerkeleyDB database system or Red Hat paying an estimated $350 million for JBoss Inc., supplier of the JBoss application server.