lustratus LiteBytes

IONA has just announced that it has received an unsolicited offer to be acquired by an unnamed company.

Over the last week there has been speculation that Software AG is the mysterious buyer.  Software AG buying would make some sense in that it is inline with its vision of building a major integration company through acquisition.  IONA does have an excellent customer base and an interesting SOA OSS play.  On the downside, IONA main business comes from the declining CORBA market and there would also be major overlaps on its closed source SOA side with the already crowded Software AG catalog post its WebMethods acquisition.

However, alternative buyers are less obvious as it is a company in the middle of a difficult transition – attempting to replace its rapidly decreasing CORBA revenue stream with lower than expected growth in its open and closed source SOA product lines.  Which means that I am putting my money on Software AG being the acquirer.

Ronan

p.s. It is beginning to feel like this is becoming a finance blog – rest assured with only Tibco left out there, the current merger wave is bound to come to an end!