Bedford, Massachusetts-based application development player Progress Software Corp has announced its intention to acquire Apptivity Corp of Newark, California for a combination of cash and stock totaling around $13m. Progress will take a hit of around $10m in the third (August) quarter to cover the acquisition. The company says it has around $100m cash in the bank. Apptivity has Java database tools which are intended for developers building and deploying multi-tiered, intranet and Internet applications. The buy fills what has been a gaping hole for progress as far as Java was concerned: its flagship WebSpeed development tool, version 2.0 of which is scheduled to ship on July 15, generates only HTML-based applications. There will be some integration of the server component of Apptivity’s tool and the server side of progress’s WebSpeed, but the products will still be sold separately. There was talk of such integration when progress acquired Visual Basic development house Crescent Software Inc in January 1995; but today Crescent’s products are still very separate from the progress offerings. But progress president Joseph Alsop says Apptivity and WebSpeed solve different problems. The company apparently chose Apptivity for its unique ability to generate both the front end (client) and the business logic (server) sides of an application. Over one million progress shares were traded before noon on June 27 – three days before the official announcement of the acquisition. The shares eventually landed unchanged at $16 at the close of business on Monday. Progress says there will be no redundancies as a result of the acquisition.
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