Rogue Wave Software Inc said yesterday that it plans to purchase NobleNet Inc, the Southboro, Massachusetts, supplier of distributed application software tools for approximately $12m in cash. The acquisition will be accounted for as a merger and is expected to close during the first calendar quarter of 1999. Rogue Wave said it made the acquisition to enable its customers to extend their applications from the enterprise to the internet, using NobleNet’s Noveau distributed object and remote procedure call (RPC) technology. Rogue Wave provides object oriented components that build business logic for enterprise applications but Gillian Webster, VP marketing said customers were increasingly asking them for a solution that would enable them to extend their applications beyond the enterprise to the internet. We chose NobleNet because it is the first object request broker (ORB) technology designed for the internet from ground up, she said, most of the other ORB technologies suffer from performance problems because they weren’t designed exclusively with the internet in mind, but Noveau was built to service internet applications so the performance is much faster. The other main benefit, said Rogue Wave CEO Mike Scally, is the ability to integrate with legacy systems. You may start out as one company, but through an acquisitions or a merger you suddenly have a mix of software systems to deal with, he said. Noveau allows companies to integrate those; to enable multiple ORBs, such as Iona, Inprise, IBM, BEA, Oracle and Microsoft, to communicate, he added. Scally said Rogue Wave would market the technology to its existing Fortune 1000 customers first, in particular financial and telecommunications providers who are developing e-commerce applications as a way of gaining competitive advantage. Previously, those customers would have developed the business logic components using Rogue Wave tools but they would have had to go elsewhere if they wanted to distribute those applications across the internet.
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