The firm, which is privately held and took on $15m in venture capital funding last April, claims to be growing fast and breaking even. Asked whether it is too early to be considering a flotation, the firm’s executive vice president of products, David Clarke, said: I don’t know — the business is growing strongly and performing well. I think towards the back end of the year you look at revenue, and the markets, and see how that would play out.

Numerous VC investors are surely eager to see a return on their investment in the company, which has its headquarters in San Mateo, California. Cape Clear is believed to have taken on in the region of $50m VC funding since it was founded in September 1999.

It took on $2m in seed funding from ACT Venture Capital in 2000; $16m in a Series A funding from Accel Partners and Greylock Partners in 2001; $10m in Series B funding from Accel and Greylock in 2003; an unknown amount in a covert Series C round; and $15m last April led by InterWest but with repeat investments from Accel, ACT and Greylock.

Clarke said that all of the firm’s investors are being incredibly supportive. He said that as a private firm it has been able to test out different kinds of revenue model for its flagship Enterprise Service Bus Platform. For instance customers can opt to pay on a per-transaction basis by metering the transactions that are handled by the ESB, and they have the option of paying monthly, too.

Last month the firm launched version 7.0 of its ESB Platform, claiming it enables on-demand integration thanks to its scalability, reliability and fast time-to-market.

While the software cannot be delivered in a hosted fashion like software as a service (SaaS), it has been deployed by many SaaS providers such as Workday, Mr Ted, Right Now Technologies, salesforce.com and McKee.

Clarke said that unlike rivals such as IBM, Oracle and BEA, it has no intention of building out what some might call an SOA suite. We think the whole attempt to define an SOA stack is at risk of over-complexity, he said. SOA risks becoming a dinosaur with some of those approaches. Cape Clear argues that its ESB can underpin companies’ SOA projects with fast time-to-market and flexible integration.