Acquisition of the Week

This one's not even cold off the press. IBM just acquired Web services security and acceleration vendor, DataPower.

IBM acquisition of DataPower
IBM expects that the acquisition will smooth implementation of SOAs using its WebSphere technology, as well as improving security, performance and management of business processes. IBM will continue to offer DataPower's products (our latest review including DataPower's XS40) and, we assume, will integrate DataPower technology into its SOA strategy - specifically its ESB story - as a complementary component of its architecture, likely with specific tweaks in the WebSphere line to harness the power of DataPower's accelerated XML parsing and tranformation capabilities.
This is an odd move for IBM, given that DataPower is a hardware based solution and IBM's hardware is server focused, not networking focused. The announcement comes on the heels of Intel's recent acquisition of Sarvega, though it does not appear that the Intel acquisition was a driver behind the IBM acquisition. Instead, there is speculation that this is perhaps a slap at Cisco's AON technology, which has yet to see the light of day.