SOA Software buys Blue Titan

SOA Software plans to add messaging and mediation expertise to its service-oriented architecture platform with the acquisition of Blue Titan Software.

The Santa Monica, Calif.-based vendor Monday is expected to announce that it's purchasing Blue Titan, which makes infrastructure software designed to help companies control and coordinate Web services across heterogeneous environments.

Blue Titan's Network Director software specializes in policy-based mediation between different standards, messaging protocols and programming models. IT staff can set rules for message routing, authentication and monitoring as well as maintain a consistent way to expose, access and reuse enterprise data and processes. On the integration front, Network Director can mediate between different environments, translating SOAP 1.1 to 1.2 or bridging HTTP to JMS, for example.

The mediation technology from Blue Titan complements SOA Software's security and governance products, says Roberto Medrano, executive vice president of SOA Software. "It's a piece of the puzzle that we did not have before," he says.

SOA Software makes Service Manager, which is designed to secure, monitor and manage XML and Web services applications; Registry, a UDDI repository; and XML VPN for securing services published outside the enterprise. It also offers SOLA, which is based on technology SOA Software acquired from Merrill Lynch to expose mainframe applications as Web services.

The Blue Titan purchase marks SOA Software's fourth acquisition in 18 months. Before picking up Merrill Lynch's X4ML technology in late 2005, it acquired SOA vendors Flamenco Networks (when SOA Software was known as Digital Evolution) and ThoughtDigital.

SOA Software is on track to become the first $100 million vendor with an SOA-specific offering, says Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst at research firm ZapThink. "SOA Software was already strong in the areas of security, management and runtime governance, while Blue Titan brings enterprise-class mediation to the fold," he says.

Combined, the two vendors aim to provide offer a platform-neutral SOA infrastructure that can work with enterprise service bus (ESB) products from vendors such as BEA Systems, IBM, Tibco and webMethods.

"Platform neutrality is an important factor here, because companies are finding that when they take the platform/ESB approach to SOA infrastructure, they still need a way to handle mediation among various platforms and integration technologies -- middleware for their middleware," Bloomberg says. With the Blue Titan purchase, SOA Software's platform can be tied to whatever ESB or other integration infrastructure is already in place at an enterprise, he says.

SOA Software did not disclose the terms of the Blue Titan acquisition. Going forward, Frank Martinez, Blue Titan's founder and CEO, will be an executive vice president at SOA Software, responsible for product strategy.

Blue Titan's customers include Pfizer, British American Tobacco and Yahoo.