Micro Focus International plc announced that one of its subsidiaries has reached a definitive agreement with Progress Software Corporation for the acquisition of Progress’s Orbix, Orbacus and Artix software product lines, for a total of $15 million. The acquisition is expected to be completed by January 21.
Originally acquired by Progress as part of its acquisition of IONA Technologies plc, the product lines are complementary to Micro Focus’ Visibroker range. The product lines, which will be maintained, developed and supported by Micro Focus going forward, are used by approximately 200 enterprise customers which overlap with the Micro Focus customer base and include large multi-national organizations in the telecommunications, financial services, and government verticals.
In April 2012, Progress announced a restructuring, through which the company said it would concentrate on the Application Platform-as-a-Service (aPaaS) market, beefing up investments in its core OpenEdge, DataDirect Connect and Apama Analytics and Decisions products and integrating them into a single offering.
Orbix and Visibroker address the issues faced by customers in passing information securely and efficiently between applications and tend to be deployed in large mission critical networks. They are implementations of the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (“CORBA”) standard, a multi-protocol, multi-platform integration solution that bridges the gap between different operating systems and languages.
Orbacus is a source available CORBA 2.6 implementation and designed for rapid development, deployment and support and its small footprint allows it to be easily embedded into memory constrained applications.
Artix is an extensible Enterprise Service Bus (“ESB”) for the deployment, management and securing service-oriented architectures. The acquisition of Artix provides Micro Focus with an enhanced capability to serve customers in their core systems and enables the deployment of new solutions addressing the challenges posed by the increasing use of mobile, virtual and cloud-based applications, the vendor says.
Through the acquisition of Orbix, Orbacus and Artix, Micro Focus expects to be a leading provider of CORBA software. The 30 employees currently working on all three products are expected to be transferred to Micro Focus. Additional information is available at www.microfocus.com.