The Series B round was led by Accel Partners. Benchmark Capital, the lead investor in SpringSource's first round of financing, also participated. Word on the street is that the valuation was very pleasing to the team there.
I didn't think much about the Covalent acquisition when it happened but now that Iona is going away, SpringSource is the one-stop shop for Spring, Tomcat and ActiveMQ along with their new Spring Application Platform.
Good for the Spring guys for figuring out how to monetize Apache-licensed projects while building in secret sauce to sell their products. The subtle shift from free software to open source shouldn't be underestimated. Just selling support is not a sustainable business model.
The Iona acquisition rumors have been flying for months, and now we know the winner (loser?) of the prized pig: Progress Software. This is a not a bad purchase for Progress, which does a lot of business in legacy application integration. Iona's CORBA products are good and fit into the Progress customer base. What they'll do with 3 of the same products (Artix, Sonic, and Servicemix) I have no idea.
Having dealt with Iona personally over the last two years as they have "participated" in the open-source community I can say that I am very pleased that the company is being taken out. For all their open-source positing, Iona has been divisive in the community and clouded the market with FUD. I don't see how or why Progress would continue with the open-source efforts, which haven't been particularly lucrative.
From the competitive standpoint I can't point to a single account where Mule has lost to Iona or Progress (though I am sure they exist) in our multithousand user base. Now the odds are even lower.
I tend to be fairly low-key on this blog (and in public) about my company's complete and total domination, whereas these third-tier players like Iona blather on and flail. These guys and others like them are just noise.
My targets remain Tibco, BEA, Oracle, IBM, and so on. If you are an open-source company and your goal is to beat other open-source companies then you are destined to fail. The economics of re-attacking a market that is shrunk by open-source pricing simply don't work.
As a great man said in the movie There Will Be Blood, I drink your milkshake.
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