The deal will add EJB capabilities to Allaire’s Cold Fusion application server
January 4, 2000 — Continuing the trend of application server vendors looking to extend their reach beyond what is quickly becoming a commoditized market, Allaire Corp. on Tuesday purchased Valto Systems, a company specializing in Enterprise JavaBean (EJB)-based server technologies.
The deal, according to Jeremy Allaire, CTO of Allaire, will fill out the company’s overall ebusiness platform by providing greater Java support and transaction technology. That technology will be used across Allaire’s existing Cold Fusion application server and Spectra packaged applications.
“The key reason we did this deal is that increasingly we’ve seen our enterprise customers looking to move to a tiered development and deployment model with transaction and message queuing infrastructures integrated into it,” said Jeremy Allaire. “We recognized about 24 months ago that the long term players in this market are not application server vendors, but ebusiness platform vendors.”
From a competitive standpoint, the combined offerings will place Allaire next to BEA and IBM as the only application server vendors currently able to provide customers with integrated transaction monitoring and message queuing in their EJB server tier. The advantages of that, Jeremy Allaire said, will be twofold.
“The real architectural advantage is the separation of business logic from the presentation tier, which means the application infrastructure is more reusable,” he said. “In the transaction and message queuing, we can offer customers the promise that under no condition will their software fail.”
While the company has not yet committed to a specific timetable for integrating Valto Systems’ capabilities with it’s own technology, the company has said it plans on bringing to market a standards-compliant suite of Java 2, Enterprise Edition, server products based on Valto’s technology.
Those servers will connect to Allaire’s Cold Fusion application server and will include a Java Server Pages (JSP) server with full support for the JSP 1.1 and Servlets 2.2 specifications, an EJB server compliant with the EJB 1.1 specification, a Java transaction server based on the Java Transaction Architecture 1.0 specification, and a Java message queue server based on the Java Messaging Service 1.0 specification.
Allaire also plans to continue selling Valto’s Ejipt 1.2 EJB server, and to release a public beta of the next-generation Ejipt later this month.
The transaction will be accounted for as a pooling of interests, with Allaire doling out 225,000 shares of common stock. Valto’s employees will join Allaire immediately and their Founder and CTO, Imre Kifor, will move into Allaire’s engineering management team to lead the development of EJB technologies.
