Actional Corporation, the self-acclaimed Web services management (WSM) leader, was acquired last week by Progress Software to strengthen the SOA offering of its Sonic Software division. According to a ZapThink analyst, Actional adds more active management and more robust security to Sonic's popular enterprise service bus (ESB), and turns it into a more complete SOA stack.
Some of the solutions that Actional offers are SOAPstation, a powerful Web service broker; the Looking Glass Server, a service network management and policy server, as well as Active Agents for e.g. Microsoft .NET or BEA WebLogic. As service-oriented architectures can be very complex, Actional's tools are used by e.g. Starwood Hotels to monitor and manage transactions end-to-end in a very heterogenous environment. Starwood uses Linux, J2EE (JBoss and Websphere) as application platform, Oracle as a database, MQ for messaging, OpenView for systems management, Actional's Looking Glass for services management, and the UDDI-compatible Systinet services Registry for governance and policy management.
2 weeks ago, Mercury acquired Systinet, a leading provider of service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance and lifecycle management software and services. Customers such as Starwood use Systinet technology to manage SOA business services and to build secure and reliable Web services. Systinet's technology will help Mercury BTO Enterprise customers to take a lifecycle approach to optimize the quality, performance and availability of SOA business services.
Last month, Progress already acquired NEON Systems, which is a market leader in mainframe integration solutions, whose Mainframe Services Bus (MSB) supports the entire range of requirements for Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) and Event-Driven Architectures (EDA).
Progress not only has all the buzzwords, it also seems to be acquiring the leading products.
Bottom Line: Both of these moves make sense: Enterprise Service Bus and Web services management are complementary, so the functional alignment of Actional and Sonic Software products is a good idea. Also, Systinet's SOA governance and lifecycle products fit very well with Mercury's IT optimisation solutions.
Question remains who will buy all those other small pure-play SOA solution providers such as Above All, AmberPoint (Microsoft ?), Cape Clear, Infravio (IBM ?), Mindreef (IBM ?), SOA Software (CA ?), ... Although they are small, most of them have a few big customers, and it looks like buying a SOA governance solution is easier than building one, even for IBM or Microsoft.
We are covering Web services and SOA technology in our seminars, and we have a popular resource site on this.
Everybody has probably heard about the WMF-related bug that creates a critical hole in Windows. But what is this vulnerability, how does it work, what systems are affected and what can you do about it ? Computerworld's Angela Gunn has put together an interesting and extensive WMF FAQ: What you need to know.
Most people will agree that Microsoft did not handle this problem very well. First, this patch would be available on Jan. 10 (while security experts recommended the installation of an official patch), then a preliminary version of that patch leaked out "by mistake" (although it is an interesting alternative to beta reviews), and then Microsoft realized that it could not wait any longer and made the patch available on Jan. 5.
The official security bulletin and the patch can be found at Microsoft Security Bulletin MS06-001: Vulnerability in Graphics Rendering Engine Could Allow Remote Code Execution.