One of the earliest Java software houses, Sanga International Corp, is about to announce its initial public offering, ComputerWire Inc has exclusively learned. The company, which is based in Barbados with offices in 12 countries, recently pulled out of a joint venture with CSX Technology Inc, the technology unit of the transportation giant due to the transport company being preoccupied with its own internet Y2K overhaul and its prolonged acquisition of Conrail, the east coast rail system (08/07/98). Sanga chief executive John Andrews, who came from CSX in April, says the deal has been put on hold for anything up to two years and the company now intends to go it alone and, it seems, as a publicly-traded company. Sanga has a set of pure Java server applications called the Sanga Enterprise Solutions Suite, prime among them a supply chain management application, which it adapts for various verticals markets; mainly transportation, education, government, telecommunications, financial services and health care. The suite is based around its 4-Tier Distributed Computing Architecture, which separates the business logic from the application layer, thus making modification of the business rules simpler. Sanga started in early 1996 and later that year brothers Shaun and Shane Maine announced that Sanga would produce a Java GroupWare package called Sanga Pages (11-07-96). Sanga quickly decided that desktop Java was not where it was at, breaking the software into components and adapting it for use on the server. While it was still a desktop concern, Corel Corp licensed the technology for incorporation into its doomed Corel Office for Java suite, but despite these inauspicious beginnings, Sanga now employs between 350 and 400 people around the world. We’re not sure of the revenues or profitability of the company but all will soon be revealed in the company’s forthcoming S1 filing. We can also expect a fairly large contract announcement in late October or early November. Separately, Sanga announced yesterday the acquisition of Relay Business Systems Ltd, one the UK’s leading Sun Microsystems Inc resellers, on undisclosed terms. Relay is said to have revenues of $20m and approximately 50 employees. http://www.sangacorp.com