Actional Corporation and Westbridge Technology Merge
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Actional Corporation, a Web services management software provider, and Westbridge Technology, a vendor of security infrastructure solutions have announced the merger of the two companies and the completion of a round of funding for $12.9 million. The newly formed company, which will operate under the name of Actional Corporation, also unveiled the Actional SOA Command and Control Platform.
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InfoWorld - SAP and Business Objects have announced the first joint products from their merger, although the planned tight integration of the companies' software will take longer to achieve.
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Deal will merge antivirus vendor with maker of backup and archiving software.
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WEIRTON, WV -- The news came down early Monday morning: ISPAT International Group and LNM Holdings merged into a giant steel company called Mittal Steel Company.
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PC Magazine - Microsoft announces Expression Studio, a new integrated suite of its design tools, including the new Expression Media asset management tool; the software giant also announces a new preview of its "Flash killer" technology.
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In announcing the merger, the companies said Cybertrust would fold the specialties of each company -- risk management and compliance from TruSecure, identity management from Betrusted and intrusion detection and prevention from Ubizen.
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Engadget.com has resolved a dispute with the software giant over proprietary content.
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Software giant settles with Novell and the CCIA, ending years of legal wrangling.
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The New York Stock Exchange and NASD announced plans to merge their regulatory organizations and eliminate duplicative and inconsistent rules.
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Progress Software is launching its Progress Actional 7.1 SOA management platform Monday, featuring visibility across business processes and into related services and IT infrastructure.Business processes and BPM systems are tied into the underlying service infrastructure, said Dan Foody, vice president of Actional products at Progress. With Version 7.1, dependencies are revealed between business processes, services, middleware, and databases. Actional can provide proactive management or insight into why a business process failed."Now, we can relate the steps in the business process all the way down to the databases at the very end of that chain," so if a database goes down, Actional users can know which steps in the business process might be affected, Foody said.Also, if a service needs to be changed, or versioned, users can understand the impact of that service alteration. Impacts on applications such as an order entry processing system can be gauged.Actional's accommodations for BPM are needed, said analyst Frank Kenney, research director at Gartner. "It's something I think is very necessary, and it marks a different movement in the traditional SOA governance technology [space]. It starts to incorporate the notion of integrating with BPM technologies," Kenney said.Actional is providing visibility into the lifecycle of processes, but it will need to explain its system to customers and prospects, he said."The story is incredibly sophisticated, given that many people embarking on SOA governance are still getting their arms around what is a registry and what is a repository," Kenney said.Progress with Actional 7.1 also has integration with the Lombardi Teamworks BPM system and plans to add integrations with BPM systems from companies such as Software AG and Fujitsu.Support for Kerberos security also is highlighted. "It makes it easier to tie Windows environments very securely into Unix environments that may be running other security systems like SAML," Foody said.Also, Actional 7.1 can inspect the payload of messages not based on XML, such as RMI- or Enterprise JavaBeans-based messages. "[This capability] allows you to gain deeper insight into the applications that haven't yet been converted to Web services or may never get converted to Web services," said Foody.Actional 7.1 is available now with prices starting at $20,000. Progress acquired Actional about two years ago.
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(InfoWorld) - Building a bridge is rarely a quiet affair. Just ask John Augustus Roebling and his son, Washington, whose Brooklyn Bridge took 13 years to complete and cost 27 people their lives. Nevertheless, for the past two years, IT titans Cisco and Microsoft have been engaged in a monumental and more-or-less silent bridge-building effort, as teams of engineers at both companies have worked to join two very different technologies that do the same thing: screen computers for security threats before allowing them to access a corporate network. Last Wednesday, the time had finally come to pull the covers off that integration, which one Cisco executive acknowledged took longer than expected. At The Security Standard conference in Boston, the two companies demonstrated interactions between Vista systems using Microsoftâs NAP (Network Access Protection) and network hardware using Ciscoâs NAC (Network Admission Control) architecture. They also released a white paper describing how the two network access control systems can interoperate and presented a road map for delivering interoperable NAC and NAP products to market. Still, serious questions remain about when interoperable NAC and NAP systems will be available and whether the solution will fit the needs of most enterprise networks. The announcement capped off a two-year integration effort that has been shrouded in mystery. Since saying in October 2004 that they would integrate NAC and NAP, the companies have been sparing with details, prompting speculation that the integration was more PR than reality. Bob Gleichauf, CTO of Ciscoâs security technology group, acknowledged that NAC-NAP integration took longer than the companies planned. However, the official silence about the integration project had more to do with the effort of harnessing resources at two notoriously bottom-line-focused companies than with the technical hurdles of integrating NAC and NAP, he said. Customers who use both Cisco and Microsoft products, and upgrade to both Vista on the desktop and Longhorn Server, will be able to use NAP, NAC, or an integrated NAP-NAC solution for client health screening, Microsoft said. Vistaâs NAP System Health Agent will send system health status reports to Microsoft NPS (Network Policy Server) running on Longhorn. A Cisco Secure ACS (Access Control Server) will instruct the NAP agent on the client system about how to access the network after the health check is complete, according to Gleichauf and Mark Ashida of Microsoft. However, Cisco and Microsoft face tough questioning about how their system will support third-party operating systems, network gear, and point security products. Ashida said Microsoft was focusing on NAC NAP for now but fully intends to support other 802.1x-compliant NAC infrastructure vendors. The benefits of integrated NAC and NAP are at least a year away for enterprises, with Longhorn server months away from availability and widespread adoption of Vista on enterprise desktops also well off in the future, said John Pescatore, an analyst at Gartner. Jon Oltsik, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, said the Cisco-Microsoft partnership was creating uncertainty in an area that cries out for open standards and multivendor support. âTheyâre treating the symptom but not the disease,â Oltsik said. âUsers want open solutions that support Linux clients and wireless and any kind of switch or router.â The integration between Microsoft and Cisco, while good for those companies, will hinder open standards efforts such as the Trusted Computing Groupâs Trusted Network Connect standard, Oltsik said. âThis is a 1990s solution. Itâs a big step back for client security.â
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IN a twist of the ongoing consolidation in information security, leading players Betrusted and TruSecure are to merge. The merger will lead to the formation of Cybertrust -- a large privately held info-sec
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A Waltham maker of security software is being acquired by software behemoth Computer Associates in a cash deal worth almost a half-billion dollars, the companies announced yesterday.
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This week saw three merger deals worth about $60 billion--including one that ranks as the largest software merger in history.
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A new product lets workers combine simple bits of software to create business tools.
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DIGITAL Bridges, the mobile phone games company, has acquisitions in its sights after signing an exclusive deal with the worldâs biggest computer game publisher.
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Best Software launched this week an overhaul of its Act contact management software, adding to the product line a second version with more scalability and advanced functionality.