Cisco systems buys Reactivity
Cisco Systems has announced a US$135 million acquisition of Reactivity, a maker of XML gateway and security hardware designed to speed up and secure Web services traffic on enterprise networks. The move strengthens Cisco’s application acceleration portfolio with Reactivity’s XML Manager, Gateway and Firewall products — appliances designed to speed up processing of service oriented architecture (SOA) application traffic, which uses bulky protocols such as XML and Simple Object Access Protocol. The Reactivty gear will join Cisco’s own Application Oriented Networking XML inspection products.
Microsoft forms BPM alliance
Microsoft is forming a new alliance under which 10 vendors have agreed to incorporate support for Microsoft’s business process management server into their BPM products. The 10 vendors in the alliance will use Microsoft’s .NET 3.0 Framework to build support for the BizTalk Server into the BPM tools. The initial members of the BPA are AmberPoint Inc., Ascentn Corp., IDS Scheer AG, Fair Isaac Corp., Global360 Inc., InRule Technology Inc., Metastorm Inc., PNMsoft, RuleBurst Ltd. and SourceCode Technology Holdings Inc. It will focus on business process modeling and analysis, business rules management, human-centric workflow, process simulation and service-oriented architecture lifecycle management, Microsoft said.
Software AG goes all SOA
As part of a new strategy aimed at growth markets, business software vendor Software AG said it will focus on SOA products and services and plans acquisitions to broaden its product portfolio and market share. The company, which used to tag itself The XML Company, sees its future in helping businesses migrate their legacy IT systems to SOA-enabled infrastructures. Software AG offers a suite of products, including its main Crossvision application, that help companies build SOA-based services and the interfaces to link them to other applications.
