Actional Corporation and Westbridge Technology Merge, Raising the Bar for Service Oriented Architecture Enablement.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Combined Company Secures $12.9 Million in Funding and Launches Breakthrough SOA Command and Control Platform

Actional Corporation, a leading Web services management software provider, and Westbridge Technology, a leading vendor of security infrastructure solutions for Web services and service-oriented architectures (SOA), today announced the merger of the two companies and the completion of a round of funding for $12.9 million. The newly formed company, which will operate under the name of Actional Corporation, also unveiled the Actional SOA Command and Control Platform, an industry breakthrough in SOA enablement made possible through the combination of the merged companies' technologies and domain expertise.

"This merger marks the beginning of the next wave of SOA enablement, and yields a powerful solution set that simplifies an organization's adoption of SOA, accelerates the associated cost benefits, and increases business agility," said Tom Ryan, former CEO of Westbridge Technology and now CEO of Actional Corporation. "Actional's new SOA Command and Control Platform is more than just the integration of our best-of-breed technologies for XML security and Web services management. It offers the broadest set of solutions for securing, deploying and managing SOAs, all from a single vendor, all within a unified yet open framework."

The Need for SOA Command and Control

Early Web services and SOA adopters have encountered challenges in deploying successful and scalable implementations, whether for small Web services projects or in charting a course for wholesale adoption of SOA across the enterprise. Chief among requirements is the critical need to efficiently secure and manage service-based applications. Adding to the complexity has been the stress on organizations to cobble together and maintain separate best-of-breed technologies from a variety of vendors. Ideally, adopting an open SOA framework that provides a central point of control for all aspects of managing an SOA will help facilitate effective supervision and governance of the overall SOA environment to align these systems with critical business requirements such as compliance and customer satisfaction.

"As the adoption of Web services and SOAs expands, the needs of organizations are evolving and becoming more complex, as are the roles of those responsible for developing and executing a successful SOA strategy," said Sandra Rogers, program director of SOA and Web services for IDC. "With their complementary technologies, the combined offering from the merger of Actional and Westbridge is targeted at simplifying the work needed to deploy an integrated SOA environment, thus driving down total cost of ownership, and by remaining open, leveraging the value of an organization's existing IT investments."

Introducing Actional SOA Command and Control Platform

With this merger, Actional and Westbridge are combining their strengths to deliver the Actional SOA Command and Control Platform, a new breed of solution that provides a unified command and control layer that brings the SOA into alignment with business objectives and drives SOA efficiency across the enterprise. Further, the Actional SOA Command and Control Platform offers comprehensive solutions designed to address the range of challenges organizations encounter, from early Web services projects to strategic SOA implementations, and provides a migration path as companies progress through the SOA lifecycle.

Actional SOA Command and Control provides comprehensive solutions that enable organizations to:

--Achieve true end-to-end SOA visibility, security, control within the enterprise and beyond the edge, ensuring that an organization's SOA is secure and operational 24/7 for mission-critical applications

--Drive rapid compliance with all policies (security, business, regulatory) from all functional areas through quick and seamless policy implementation and management capabilities

--Monitor and manage a heterogeneous SOA through an open architecture that can support all elements of the SOA fabric whether from Actional or another provider of brokers or security gateways, as well as all SOAP and non-SOAP services such as databases, Web pages, legacy services and more

--Maintain business continuity across the SOA through real-time response to security, performance or availability breaches, leveraging rapid root cause analysis and corrective action capabilities

--Optimize and automatically tune the SOA to guarantee ongoing attainment of ever-changing service level agreements, performance targets, regulatory compliance and other business or IT objectives

--Seamlessly interoperate with and leverage the capabilities of key third-party infrastructure such as identity management systems, directory services, enterprise management systems, leveraging an organization's investment in those technologies

"This merger provides companies such as ours with a unified SOA infrastructure for controlling an increasingly fragmented service environment, helping to ensure compliance and achieve true business alignment," said Christopher Crowhurst, vice president and principal architect, Thomson Learning. "Actional SOA Command and Control addresses the toughest challenges that we've encountered in the evolution of our SOA, and presents the strongest value proposition on the market."

Availability and Pricing

Actional's SOA Command and Control Platform is available as a full suite or in any combination of individual products that meet an organization's requirements. The first release of the full Actional SOA Command and Control Platform will be available in 30 days, with a starting price of $75,000.

Individual products for XML security and Web services management are available immediately and may be purchased separately. The existing Westbridge XMS product will be offered as Actional XMS. The existing Actional product line remains intact. Pricing starts at $4,995 per CPU.

Merger and Funding Details

The combining of Actional and Westbridge is a merger of equals. All major investors from both companies participated in the $12.9 million funding, which is classified as the C round. Investors include: Arrowpath Venture Capital, August Capital, Granite Ventures, International Capital Group, NEA, NeoCarta, SAIC Venture Capital and Sevin Rosen. The new Actional board of directors includes representatives from both companies' previous boards.

About Actional Corporation

As a leading provider of SOA enablement solutions, Actional Corporation addresses the specific challenges of securing, deploying and managing service-oriented environments, from early Web services projects to enterprisewide SOA initiatives. The company's sole mission is to keep customers' SOAs secure and operational 24/7, making Actional the choice of leading organizations around the world including Danish Immigration Service, Partners Healthcare, Thomson Prometric, MCI, Telstra, Travelers, the U.S. government and others. With Actional's SOA Command and Control Platform, customers can reduce costs and ease the complexity of SOA deployments, thereby increasing the responsiveness of IT, accelerating time-to-market of business-critical applications and capitalizing on the business value of their SOA. Actional, which recently merged with Westbridge Technology, is a privately held company based in Mountain View, Calif. www.actional.com.