Micro Focus International recently announced it would be acquiring intellectual property and other assets and the assumption of liabilities associated with Progress Software's Orbix, Orbacus and Artix software product lines.
How does this fit into Micro Focus' philosophy of moving mainframe environments to commodity platforms? "This is not so much a new direction as a continuation of current Micro Focus corporate direction,” Neil Fowler, director of development of COBOL and mainframe solutions at Micro Focus, tells 5 Minute Briefing. “The Orbix, Artix and Orbacus products represent a strong technology franchise that complements our own activities in the CORBA market. The combination of our product Visibroker, and the Orbix, Orbacus and Artix products means we will be the largest global provider of CORBA products in the market.”
CORBA is still a strong and vibrant market in the enterprise space, Fowler continues. “We offer leading products to a strong customer base looking to link established technologies to new IT trends like mobility, cloud and virtualization. CORBA technology is established and important in so many companies' IT infrastructure. It needs to be preserved and modernized and we are the only credible player in this space."
Artix is an enterprise service bus (ESB) for the deployment, management and securing of SOA. These acquisitions strengthen Micro Focus' offerings within the SOA space, Fowler says. "Artix provides additional SOA capabilities to the Orbix CORBA services allowing the business logic to be reused from a wide range of client environments,” he says. “These capabilities complement Micro Focus' strength in providing similar SOA benefits for COBOL business applications helping ensure the ongoing reuse and realization of value within their application portfolio."
Orbix and Visibroker are both 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.
For additional information, visit http://www.microfocus.com.