SOA Software buys mainframe Web services platform

SOA Software Monday plans to announce that it has acquired a mainframe Web services development and deployment platform from Merrill Lynch & Co. that it will add to its portfolio of Web services infrastructure software. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Merrill Lynch began building its X4ML platform in 2001 to expose its legacy Customer Information Control System (CICS) applications as integration-ready Web services. The New York financial services company now runs 600 Web services processing 1.5 million transactions per day on the system. The platform enables mainframe applications to both expose and consume Web services, making it easier to integrate them with modern applications in an services oriented architecture (SOA).

SOA Software, with headquarters in Santa Monica, Calif., intends to sell X4ML as a stand-alone product called Service Oriented Legacy Architecture (SOLA). X4ML’s development team has joined SOA Software, bringing along their expertise in CICS and z/OS programming. SOLA will be available next year, with pricing starting at $125,000.

SOA Software changed its name earlier this year from Digital Evolution to indicate its focus on enabling SOA, a methodology for connecting software components through standards-based Web services in order to ease IT integration. The privately held company is backed by around $30 million in venture capital and partners with other middleware vendors including IBM, CA, Oracle and BEA.