Progress’ SVP corporate development and strategy, Jeff Stamen, told me in an interview in London yesterday: “There will be a merger: we’re not going to have two separate code bases, we’re going to merge them together.”
Since Progress bought Iona for around $107m net of cash balances this June, some observers have wondered whether Progress would ditch one of the ESBs, especially since its own Sonic ESB appears to have a far broader market penetration than Iona’s Artix.
But Stamen told me that the two ESBs were sufficiently different to warrant a merger of common code rather than to see one of them subsumed by the other – despite the apparent overlap. “They each have some unique pieces,” said Stamen. “Like Artix has some CORBA [common object request broker architecture] application programming interfaces (APIs) that we just didn’t have in Sonic, and Sonic had the SonicMQ message queuing that Artix hasn’t got.”
So while Stamen said that Progress will merge the ESBs where they have common code bases, he added: “While we will merge them that does not mean that we will have only one product. We will merge them together but you could perhaps buy an Artix ‘profile’, if you like, which will feature the container with the CORBA APIs, or a Sonic ‘profile’ with things like the SonicMQ capabilities.”
Stamen confirmed that Progress will phase out the Iona brand altogether shortly, but is likely to retain certain Iona product names and initiatives such as Artix, the CORBA-focused Orbix and the open source FUSE initiative. For more on Progress’ plans for Iona’s open source FUSE initiative see this blog entry on CBR’s open source blog.
