Copacetic

Iona sold for 162m.

I returned to Ireland in 1998 after 12 years working in London. For the previous few years I had watched in awe as the Iona behemoth had hoovered up technical talent from all over the globe, to create the single largest pool of super smart geeks Ireland has probably ever known.

A year before I arrived back they had gone public with some fanfare and there are plenty of good friends of mine still living in houses bought of the back of cash from options converted and exercised in the early boom years of 1999 and 2000.

The premise was connecting disparate lumps of a software together, a kind of philosophers stone that would glue your mess of corporate systems together.  The Object Management Group (OMG) defined a standard (called CORBA) and Chris Horn, Annrai O’Toole and Sean Baker along with some willing helpers built the first commercial implementation.

When you look at the founding members of the OMG, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Apple Computer, American Airlines you realise that straightaway Iona’s product had its market sector defined for it.  All they had to do was man the phones and the orders flooded in.

Consider this, in a much more stringent capital market, with no Irish VC industry to speak of, Iona managed to take a company public without raising any venture capital whatsoever. The old saw at Iona was that to double sales you just needed to double the number of people answering the phones.

Once public they had their ups and downs and sailed up on the back of the dot com boom, unfortunately their fall was a might as everyone else’s and they never really recovered.

Where did it go wrong for Iona? They found it impossible to separate themselves from their CORBA legacy and as a result missed the boat on Java, EJB (they apparently turned down an opportunity to buy WebLogic at one point) and finally the Web itself.

But without Iona, where would the Irish Software Industry be today? Iona people form the backbone of a whole new generation of Irish software companies.

Here’s hoping we see similar success from this generation.

Chris Horn is blogging. Who is Chris Horn? The  founder an twice time CEO of Iona Technologies.  (Tip o’ the hat to Tom for the news).

Michi Henning writes about The Rise and Fall of CORBA on the ACM Queue website. In the article he describes the history and development of the CORBA standard and details why it has been relegated to a infrastructure backwater. They key reason for CORBA’s failure that resonates with me is the following statement,

The OMG does not require a reference implementation for a specification to be adopted. This practice opens the door to castle-in-the-air specifications. On several occasions the OMG has published standards that turned out to be partly or wholly unimplementable because of serious technical flaws. In other cases, specifications that could be implemented were pragmatically unusable because they imposed unacceptable runtime overhead. Naturally, repeated incidents of this sort are embarassing and do little to boost customer confidence. A requirement for a reference implementation would have forced submitters to implement their proposals and would have avoided many such incidents.

• Freshmeat announcement page (update : fixed borked link)
• Celtix Home Page
• Product page from the Iona Website
• The Celtix Demo page

InfoWorld reports on the launch of Celtix Iona’s new Open Source ESB. Iona are a little late to the Open Source party but I would expect the Celtix product to put up a pretty good showing on the technical front.

However they suffer from the same problem as Cape Clear, how do you compete on the one hand against tier one incumbents like Oracle and IBM and also hold the line against OpenSource experts like Apache and JBoss?

If egos could be massaged, one way to compete would be to merge both companies back into a single entity. The original goals of Cape Clear (low cost commodity products in the XML/CORBA/J2EE space) were lost long ago and they now range across the same prospect base as Iona.

Chris is safely ensconced on the board as chairman so any old enmity could be smoothed over by the new Iona CEO Peter Zotto. Give Annrai back his old job as CTO, tag him as a serial entrepreneur (did it twice!) and move all the Cape Clear staff back from the pugatory of Donnybrook to the central location of Shelbourne Road.

Job done!