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SOA Software Inc. this week is expected to announce the acquisition of a mission-critical mainframe Web services platform from Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc.
Eric Pulier, chairman and founder of SOA Software, said the purchase of the X4ML mainframe Web services platform will provide SOA Software with production-proven technology that complements its existing products and offers enterprise customers a full SOA (service-oriented architecture) infrastructure addressing business-to-business, legacy and distributed applications.
Andy Brown, chief technology architect at New York-based Merrill Lynch, said the financial services company began designing and building X4ML in 2001 and is running Version 3 of the platform in production, exposing and consuming more than 600 Web services and processing more than 1.5 million transactions per day.
Pulier said SOA Software, of Los Angeles, will bring the technology to market under the brand name SOLA, for Service Oriented Legacy Architecture.
Meanwhile, in addition to the technology, SOA Software has acquired the team responsible for creating and managing the platform at Merrill Lynch.
Jim Crew, the creator of X4ML, is one of the developers SOA Software is bringing over in the deal.
“[Mainframe developers] love that this has given their code a new lease on life,” said Crew, a 14-year veteran of Merrill Lynch.
With SOLA, services will be published by the service owner and automatically listed in a UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) repository.
The technology is based on Web services standards such as WS-Security and WS-Policy.
The acquisition will pit SOA Software against larger rivals such as IBM and others that are trying to provide ways to bring legacy mainframe applications into the world of Web services and SOA.
SOLA will be available from SOA Software later this month.
