Where have all the flowers gone?

Alright, I don’t mean flowers I mean software companies. This month (June) saw the announcement that Mainstar has been acquired by Rocket Software (www.rocketsoftware.com). We also had ASG (www.asg.com) sealing its deal to acquire Diversified Software Systems and integrating their products into its OpsCentral solutions platform. What else? Well we heard that AttachmateWRQ had completed its takeover of NetIQ – and rather than calling the new company AttachmateWRQNetIQ, or some other extended mouthful of name, they decided that simply going back to Attachmate (www.attachmate.com) would be best. That was announced 5 June. Not to be left out, CA (ca.com) has acquired XOsoft, a company in the continuous application and information availability market. The acquisition enables CA to offer a complete recovery management solution allowing customers to minimize the risk of data loss, reduce the time spent on back-ups, and expedite recovery of critical business services – they claim.

So if all this can happen in a single month, who’s going to be left at the end of the year?
Perhaps to avoid a takeover, companies like NetManage (www.netmanage.com) and Cape Clear Software (www.capeclear.com) are forming partnerships, which, in this case, they claim is intended to streamline SOA development. The two vendors' combined solutions, they said, will help move legacy and mainframe systems into a broader service-oriented architecture. NetManage brings its OnWeb and Librados Adapters to the party, while Cape Clear offers an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) designed to enable rapid reuse of process-oriented applications within mainframe applications.

Similarly, GT Software (www.gtsoftware.com) is also forming numerous partnerships. GT Software’s Ivory Service Architect enables mainframe developers to graphically orchestrate mainframe transaction, application, data, and Web services into multi-step, multi-operation business services. It is pushing itself in the SOA arena and has a partnership with Merlin Software, which will help it deploy its products at federal agencies. It also has a partnership with Relativity Technologies to accelerate and boost SOA-enablement. Then there’s the partnership with Relativity Technologies, which has a similar aim. And finally (in my quick look through my files, anyway) there’s a partnership with Skyway Software, who are in the SOA design and delivery market.

Going back to Mainstar… they made quite a few announcements recently. They announced Version 9.01 of their FastAudit/390 Suite. The product is designed to keep z/OS environments trouble-free with high-speed, accurate, and flexible audits. They also announced Version 6.0.0E of RealTime Defrag/Extended Processing (RTD/XP), a disk space management product designed to simplify and automate the process of continuously managing the free space and datasets on each disk under its control.

In the twenty years that I have been producing the news section for Xephon’s (www.xephonusa.com) Update publications I have never seen quite such a feeding frenzy. It seems that the software giants are safe from each other at the moment, but the successful smaller companies definitely need to form partnerships if they are to avoid being gobbled up in today’s carnivorous market place.

Mainframe-related news items can be sent to Trevor Eddolls at TrevorE@xephon.com.