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Monday, October 25, 2010
Progress Software spins out open source-focused FuseSource
By Rodney H. Brown
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Progress Software Corp. has spun out a new company called FuseSource Corp., to take advantage of an open source-based line of software integration and messaging tools that company picked up when it acquired Iona Technologies PLC of Ireland for $162 million in 2008.
According to Larry Alston, FuseSource’s newly appointed president, the new company will be based in the Bedford offices of Progress Software (Nasdaq: PRGS) and will have 50 to 55 employees “right out of the gate. We have plans to grow up in the 70 employee range by the end of the year.”
Alston was originally general manager of the Fuse division at Iona and, following the purchase, he left to work with a number of open source-focused companies, including EnterpriseDB Corp. of Westford. When Progress saw the value in the Fuse line of products, it recruited Alston back.
FuseScource has four main software products, all of which are based on certified distributions of Apache Software Foundation projects. FUSE ESB is an enterprise service bus based on Apache ServiceMix. FUSE Message Broker, based on Apache ActiveMQ, is a Java Message Service Message Broker, which enables applications and service components to communicate with each other. FUSE Services Framework is a platform for rapid development and deployment of web services based on Apache CXF, and FUSE Mediation Router handles enterprise traffic based on Apache Camel.
In January, Progress Software acquired California business process management technology company Savvion Inc. for $49 million.
As a division of Progress Software, FuseSource saw impressive growth last year, according to Alston.
“We had 130 percent plus growth last year and we realized if we were really going to get the most out of this business, we needed to separate it out,” he said. “That was done in the context of just being a product line, not really with the focus it should have had.”
One of the reasons for creating a new company out of the Fuse products is because the open source business model was unfamiliar to Progress, Alston said.
“Quite honestly, I don’t think they knew what to do with it,” he said. “They kind of parked it off to the side and ran it as a product line and were kind of amazed at how it grew.”
Alston projects the newly solo FuseSource will continue to see growth, although not quite so impressive, and will become profitable soon.
“We see by the end of 2012 break even happening,” Alston said. “I can’t sit here and say we will deliver 130 percent growth again next year, but it will be 75 percent growth, that’s our plan.”
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