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Despite its acquisition earlier this week by a British antivirus software maker, ActiveState Corp. said it will maintain its focus on development tools and its involvement in the open source community. Sophos Plc, based in Abingdon, U.K., announced its acquisition of Vancouver, British Columbia-based ActiveState in a $23 million transaction late Wednesday. The antivirus company sought ActiveState primarily for its enterprise antispam software, but Sophos chief technical officer told eWEEK that Sophos looks forward to growing ActiveStates tools and languages business as well.
Richard Jacobs, chief technical officer at Sophos told eWeek: “Sophos believes there is substantial value in retaining ActiveStates tools and languages business, from both operational and sales perspectives. Internally, we see the use of open source programming languages, such as Perl and Python, to offer the potential for tremendous productivity increases with our core development. To have access to this expertise both within ActiveStates dev team and the open source community as a whole is very valuable.”
Jacobs said Sophos will retain all of ActiveStates more than 100 employees in British Columbia. An ActiveState spokeswoman said the company recently released Komodo 2.5, its integrated development environment for scripting languages that runs on Linux, Solaris and Windows. And this fall the company will release a new version of its Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) plug-in for Microsoft Corp.s Visual Studio .Net, called Visual XSLT 2.0.
“From a sales perspective, ActiveState has a substantial community of hundreds of thousands of programmers that rely on its software, and we are fully committed to maintaining and growing this, with numerous new releases already planned for the language distributions and the productivity tools both this year and next,” Jacobs said. “ActiveState has also been very successful in selling both its gateway email solution and its tools and languages to the Fortune 500 and has a great reputation within one of the core markets that Sophos wants to sell to—the large enterprise,” he said.
The companies said Sophos antivirus technology will be integrated with ActiveStates PureMessage email protection software for a combined antivirus, antispam solution.