Where have all the (SOA) flowers gone? Gone to bigger companies every one...
Well, not quite every one. MomentumSI has actually published a list of the SOA-related companies that have been acquired, and those that are still sitting at home Saturday nights, waiting for suitors. (Thanks to James Hamilton for the pointer.)
Last week, I relayed Dave Linthicum's concern that a shrinking pool of SOA vendors means less innovation in this part of the market. Dave estimates that up to four dozen SOA-related product vendors have been scooped up into larger vendors over the past couple of years.
With help from the MomentumSI list, here are just a few of the specialized SOA vendors that have been consumed in recent times:
- The Mind Electric by webMethods
- Infravio by webMethods
- webMethods by Software AG
- LogicBlaze by IONA
- Rogue Wave by Quovadx
- Confluent by Oblix
- Oblix by Oracle
- Collaxa by Oracle
- Systinet by Mercury
- Mercury by HP
- ClientSoft by Neon
- Neon by Progress
- Blue Titan by SOA Software
- Flamenco Networks by SOA Software
- SeeBeyond by Sun Microsystems
- DataPower by IBM
- Webify by IBM
- Reactivity by Cisco
And, here are vendors that are still sitting home on Saturday nights... or are they?
- Amberpoint
- WSO2
- Active Endpoints
- SOA Software
Reactivity- Forum Systems
- Mindreef
- Layer 7 Technologies
- Cape Clear
- WebLayers
- ActiveGrid
- AboveAll Software
- Logic Library
- iTKO
- Parasoft
- Oracle (just kidding)
James Hamilton also made an interesting observation about these companies: "Any software company headquartered in the United States whose 'About' paragraph contains three magic letters of S, O, and A is either currently negotiating the terms of a deal or getting ready to walk pretty on the auction block to meet their happy highest bidder. I don't believe there is a single exception to this theory."
Let me add that that this applies to companies that offer tried-and-true SOA tools or products, since every vendor these days with a piece of code to sell -- even if it has nothing to do with SOA -- claims to be about "SOA."