Cisco acquires Reactivity

Cisco has bought an XML parsing company for $135 million, in order to beef up its network-oriented SOA strategy. InfoWorld reports the companies are practically neighbours.

Cisco agreed to pay for the privately-held appliance vendor of Redwood City, California, just a few miles up the freeway from Cisco's San Jose headquarters. Reactivity's 56 employees will join Cisco's application delivery business unit in San Jose after the deal closes, probably by the end of April.

Founded in 1998, Reactivity specialises in XML parsing, the work of analysing the XML traffic that helps to power SOA and Web 2.0 applications.

ITWire says, although the new iteration of Google Apps has some catching up to do, it will encourage innovation and office productivity just by being Web-based - with all that entails.

"Compared with the rich environment that Microsoft offers right on your desktop with Office 2003 and especially Office 2007, the competition is still looking 10 years behind, as Microsoft has previously claimed," says the article.

"Google Apps doesn't change this, except on the collaboration and ease of deployment fronts. But it's Google, and not only do they learn fast, they work fast, too. The launch date for Google Apps 2.0 is surely already on Google's roadmap, along with a version 3.0 after that."

Software AG is looking to refocus as an SOA migration expert. The company is planning acquisitions to help in its quest, reports InfoWorld.

The Darmstadt, Germany, software maker, which used to tag itself 'The XML Company', sees its future in helping businesses migrate their legacy IT systems to more flexible, SOA-enabled infrastructures.

Software AG offers a suite of products, including its main Crossvision application, which provides companies with the necessary tools to build SOA-based services and the interfaces to link them to other applications.