IONA Chairman Chris Horn

Irish software firm IONA Technologies,  today announced the acquisition of LogicBlaze, a leading provider of Open Source solutions software. LogicBlaze is privately held, and financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

IONA says that the all-cash acquisition of LogicBlaze enables it to accelerate its strategy of delivering innovative, enterprise Open Source SOA solutions to the large IT organizations typified by the Company's customers. As a result of the acquisition, the LogicBlaze organization, including co-founders Hiram Chirino, Rob Davies and James Strachan will join IONA's Open Source business.

IONA says that LogicBlaze's employees are respected experts in the Open Source community, and are key contributors to the most popular Open Source projects related to SOA, including Apache ActiveMQ and Apache ServiceMix. Many IT organizations and ISV's are incorporating these innovative Apache projects as key components of their software infrastructure in enterprise SOA environments.

"IONA's customers are looking for ways to reduce costs, while at the same time seeking to add the innovation and flexibility required of IT to rapidly respond to changing business requirements. In a 'flat world,' Open Source communities are providing a new level of creativity to support the trend toward SOA. IONA is committed to combining the innovation of Open Source with innovation from IONA and its partners to deliver solutions based on IONA's unique, distributed approach to SOA," said Peter Zotto, CEO, IONA. "LogicBlaze brings proven Open Source expertise to IONA to further advance our leadership in delivering Open Source SOA infrastructure to our customers. We're very pleased to have the LogicBlaze employees join the IONA family."

The ability to deliver enterprise-level support to companies deploying Open Source technologies is critical as an increasing number of global 2000 customers incorporate Open Source into their performance-demanding, distributed SOA environments. The acquisition of LogicBlaze is based upon of IONA's vision that successful SOA deployments will involve the use of multiple technologies, including many from the Open Source community. IONA is committed to supporting its customers' desire to incorporate these technologies in their SOA environment.

"As a greater number of large IT organizations embrace the use of Open Source technology to support their mission?critical applications, they want to know that the innovation of Open Source is paired with world-class service and support from the development stage through deployment," said James Strachan. "This is a philosophy shared by IONA and LogicBlaze."

Rob Davies continued, "IONA has demonstrated a deep commitment to Open Source and truly values the innovation being driven by the Open Source community. We're excited that LogicBlaze is now an important part of IONA's Open Source business and by the opportunities this represents for customers adopting Open Source technologies in the enterprise."

Hiram Chirino concluded, "Open Source is rapidly becoming more mainstream as customers become better educated and are better able to understand the unique value proposition of using Open Source software in their enterprise IT deployments, including SOA. The combination of IONA and LogicBlaze offer our customers even greater confidence that the Open Source technologies on which they build their SOA infrastructure are backed by true leaders in the Open Source community and the software industry."