Iona buys open-source specialist LogicBlaze

Employees of LogicBlaze, including open-source programmers and company co-founders Hiram Chirino, Rob Davies and James Strachan, will join Iona's open-source business. Financial terms for the all-cash acquisition were not disclosed.

Iona is an established integration middleware vendor that has its own open-source integration server, called Celtix, for which it began offering commercial support late last year.

LogicBlaze, too, has an open-source integration server, called LogicBlaze Fuse, which supports a number of integration server protocols. The company also offers commercial support and participates in the Apache ActiveMQ and Apache ServiceMix projects.

The move reflects software vendors' need to embrace standards-based open-source products and business models as they become more accepted among corporate customers.

For LogicBlaze, the acquisition gives the company commercial-support expertise in integration and service-oriented architecture technologies.

"As a greater number of large IT organizations embrace the use of open-source technology to support their mission-critical applications, they want to know that the innovation of open source is paired with world-class service and support from the development stage through deployment," James Strachan, LogicBlaze's chief architect, said in a statement.