Prog-iona

Some how the Progress acquisition of IONA slipped under my radar. Funny, because that brings many things on my periphery full circle.

I used to work for C-bridge Internet Solutions. eXcelon bought C-bridge after the bubble burst in 2002. Fast forward to 2005 and I'm in Portland working for a now-defunct company trying to break into the ESB space via an open model. That space leaned towards JBI. I'd still argue that we bet correct and that JBI has done a whole lot of not much, offering "vendor independent" layers on top of things that people didn't care about vendor independence for, but in 2005 we gave it a serious look.

LogicBlaze used to be one of the primary FOSS backers of JBI and from the looks of the mailing list, their core team continues to be heavily involved in the development of ActiveMQ on which their JBI implementation was based.

By April 2007, LogicBlaze was acquired by IONA. Around that time, Mike started talking with Larry who was our boss in the latter part of the eXcelon days. Mike and I were both at LM, and we regularly worked with Stephen who doesn't blog (sorry no link) but formerly worked for IONA. Mike's talks with Larry didn't go anywhere, but the IONA/C-Bridge/eXcelon/Progress/LM circle was complete.

Now, last month, Progress buys IONA and Larry again works for Progress. I'm also again doing a deep dive into ActiveMQ, whose IP is now I guess owned by Progress who I used to work for. So in some sense, the company who owned my butt as far back as 1999 is still influencing my role today.

Add to that mix a couple of interactions via TSS, OSCON and IRC with Hiram and James (which they probably don't recall but did result in some attribution), and things get even more tangled.

It never fails to amaze and amuse me how small this business is, despite being so big. The networks I started making 10 years ago still come into play even today in subtle ways and keep overlapping. Six degrees of separation is nothing, I have trouble keeping it to two.