Allaire livens up Java with Live Software buy

Web application developer Allaire today said it will acquire Live Software, the creator of JRun, pushing its Java capabilities and adding to its application servers.

Under the deal, Allaire said it will purchase San Francisco-based Live Software for approximately 550,000 shares of Allaire common stock. Based on Allaire's closing stock price of $45 yesterday, the deal is worth about $24.7 million.

The acquisition will help Allaire extend its capability to deliver products that allow a broad range of customers to build and deploy e-commerce and enterprise Web applications, partly by adopting Live Software's JRun.

The main benefit of JRun is that it allows people to run Java tools and Java support anywhere, on any hardware platform, like Linux, Unix, and Windows and on any Web servers, such as Netscape, Apache, and Microsoft, Paul Colton, founder and chief executive of Live Software, told CNET News.com. He added that JRun has "tremendous cross-platform and cross-support capabilities."

JRun claims more than 80,000 developers worldwide use the product, the two companies said.

"With this acquisition, we'll extend the Allaire Web application platform to support server-side Java--giving customers more powerful and flexible technology for delivering e-business applications," Allaire founder and chairman J.J. Allaire said in a statement.

"This is part of Allaire's Java strategy--to enable a lot of their tools with Java technology," said Colton. "We've taken the best of both technologies and we're building a better product, a combined product for the future."

Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Allaire develops Web application servers, which connect a Web browser and Web server to back-end databases--and allow companies to create e-commerce Web sites. In April, the time of Allaire's Bright Tiger Technologies acquisition, analysts had said they believe Allaire is the current leader in supplying application servers to small to mid-sized businesses. As reported, Allaire had acquired software firm Bright Tiger in a move to enter the large corporation market.

Under today's agreement, Allaire said it plans to continue to sell Live Software's JRun as a standalone product and as an integration to other Allaire products. Live Software employees will transfer over to Allaire's headquarters with Colton serving as vice president and general manager of JRun.

In addition, Allaire said it plans to incorporate JRun technology into ColdFusion, one of its Web application servers, to deliver a multilanguage, cross-platform Web application server.