IBM buying business software firm AptSoft

IBM said on Wednesday it is buying privately held AptSoft to expand its business-event processing software portfolio. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

IBM, the world's largest computer services company, said AptSoft's technology helps businesses uncover the cause-and-effect relationships among seemingly disparate business events that occur in milliseconds. IBM said Burlington, Mass.-based AptSoft will also help bolster IBM's commitment to pursue the service oriented architecture (SOA) market and complement its existing SOA software and services.

Story Copyright © 2008 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

[Andy kaufman]

IBM: if you cannot innovate buy out the competition

It worked so well so far.

Like when IBM bought out Lotus because IBM couldn't write application and server software properly.

Like when IBM bought out Weblogic because they couldn't do Web software properly.

Like when IBM dropped OS/2 in favor of Linux, because they couldn't code OS/2 properly or support most modern hardware with it either.

Then again, this isn't anything that Microsoft doesn't do either.

[bpaskin]

Short sighted

Every company has its successes and failures. The failure of OS/2 had nothing to do with the programmers and everything to do with the marketing. They bought Lotus for Notes, not for the office suite. Notes still has more seats than Exchange. And IBM has WebSphere, which leads all J2EE platforms. They never bought BEA's WebLogic. WebSphere was created in house, and has a non commercial version, as well.