IONA building SOA from pieces and people

I'm accustomed to seeing software companies acquired so the acquirer can build a system out of pieces. I have long wondered if this could work in the open source space.

IONA is trying, in the name of building a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) suite.

The company was founded in 1991, in Ireland, to build CORBA objects. Over time it transitioned into Web objects, and it now bills itself as an open source SOA company. This week it bought LogicBlaze, which had some good tools, and is integrating the company.

IONA's best known evangelist may be blogger Debbie Moynihan, who writes the company will continue selling subscriptions to LogicBlaze's ActiveMQ and ServiceMix.

But what did IONA buy, actually? Was it software, a book of business, or the team which created both, headed by Hiram Chirino, Rob Davies and James Strachan.

Reading the blog of IONA CTO Eric Newcomer, I think it's the last. Building SOA from pieces is not nearly so interesting as building a global team to support it, in the open source world.