Progress buys Mindreef: More SOA vendor consolidation?

If you are tracking the SOA vendors, you probably recently heard about Progress Software buying Mindreef (right after picking up IONA the day before as well). So let's take a minute to talk about iTKO's own view of the rapid moves and what it means for the market for software companies like us who are committed to making SOA a reality.

 

Clear message: SOAP testing isn't SOA testing

In one sense this represents consolidation, true, but in another sense, this proves that focusing on testing a single technology, such as web services doesn't provide enough coverage for the kinds of heterogeneous technologies that are inherent in today's SOA architectures, at least not enough for a company to survive on WSDL/SOAP testing alone. Mindreef was early to the market with web services testing, but over the past 5 years, we've seen that for every major enterprise, you also need to test different flavors of ESB, rich Web apps/RIAs, databases, EJB, CORBA, etc.

Dana Gardner blogged on the details of this acquisition recently, and talked a bit about his view of Mindreef in the light of WS-* testing alone:

"I took my first briefing with Mindreef, given their neighborly proximity, about three years ago. The seasoned team had a hit on their hands with SOAPscope, and their timing in the SOA market was great. But I’m not sure the company grew as was hoped, and perhaps the fast evolution of SOA beyond a WS-* emphasis played a role. SOAP hasn’t blossomed to quite the degree some people had forecast."

In fact we have always asserted that SOA Testing isn't a viable space on its own, unless it is tied in with Integration, Governance and Virtualization practices. So this kind of endgame is no different than what we've seen with Solstice for instance (which specialized in functionally testing webMethods ESB only), going to GreenHat (which tests TIBCO ESB); or Agitar (which bet on automating Java developer unit tests only) winding down operations. You need to be able to test and validate across every stage of the software lifecycle, and have the integrations and access in place to do so, across every technology layer to keep the lights blinking for critical SOA applications.

As SOA expert Joe McKendrick noted in yesterday's "Progress makes another SOA acquisition: Mindreef," Mindreef has a better home as a part of the broader solution that Progress (Actional) offers: "With IONA and Mindreef, Progress is clearly aiming to develop and offer an end-to-end suite of SOA products — from integration to management."

 

The open source market also commoditized some aspects of web services testing - as web services standards start to solidify, an open source tool like SOAPUI meets the needs of developers who don't mind coding some functional tests if they only concerned with testing WSDL/SOAP for compliance checks. This is also why we gave away a free web services only testing version of LISA for a year. And you know what we found? If a company is serious about SOA they will need to go deeper than web services.

 

Are times hard for iTKO with all this consolidation? Are you getting acquired?

• First of all, here at iTKO we are quite comfortable with our market leadership, awareness and growth. We are coming off a record quarter, record year-over-year growth, and we are reinvesting that in continued research and support, so LISA can be the most complete SOA testing, validation and virtualization framework on the market.
• Second, a BIG part of enabling quality and trust in SOA is in the ability to work with all the leading SOA platforms. Yes, we've seen a lot of consolidation lately, however our CUSTOMERS still have a heterogeneous mix of new and existing technologies to integrate and validate, and we are committed to helping them. So we will continue to partner with and drive quality and virtualization into all the leading SOA platform vendors - including TIBCO, SoftwareAG, SOA Software, SAP, IBM MQ, Oracle/BEA and more. Variety is a good thing for the agility and reuse we expected of SOA, but it presents a big risk. If we can help companies mitigate the risk of all that complexity at a lower cost, that is a good thing. 
• Third, we will support Progress customers - for instance we are still the only native Sonic ESB/integration testing solution out there, and we can interact with Actional SOA governance tools within the same framework. We can also Virtualize service environments for Progress customers, so they have a ready SOA test and dev environment without the constraints of access and dependency on a complex SOA environment - whether they use LISA to test, or try Mindreef tools. This coexistence is nothing new for us - many of our customers are also using HP/Mercury and Rational tools and processes and seek iTKO's help for SOA-specific challenges we address.

That's all for now - of course, we'll still keep up with Jeff Schneider's "SOA Consolidation" hit list to see if anything is happening we don't know about ;)

http://schneider.blogspot.com/2008/06/mindreef-acquired-by-progress-software.html

 

Comments

[David Bressler]

Jim,

Nice post! Biased ;-) but quite accurate. I really respect your clarity and vision.

First off, thanks for publicly stating that you will continue support for Progress customers. I've only heard good things about your product, and as you clearly point out, Mindreef is not a match for companies who need multi-protocol testing deep testing integration with existing systems.

However, there are things Mindreef does that LISA doesn't. More importantly to your audience, there are very cool synergies with what Mindreef does and other elements of the Progress SOA Portfolio that will make for some interesting customer benefits. Benefits that I do not expect would cause you guys to have to "re-evaluate" your continued support of Progress customers.

Being a fan of "good" software, I can truthfully wish you guys best of luck...

David
Progress Actional Product Evangelist

[Jason English]

Thanks for the comment David. There are certainly good things about the solution, and like we are saying, it makes sense for Soapscope to be a part of a broader SOA management suite with you guys, rather than a specialized web services testing tool on the market.

As for the "bias," well isn't a key function of a business blog to express your position on the issues as you see them? ;)