San Francisco-based middleware company Peerlogic Inc has acquired ICL Plc’s i500 directory business, on undisclosed terms. It’s the second sale of ICL technology to the company – last year it bought exclusive licensing and took on the further development of ICL’s Dias object request broker business (CI No 3,479). Added to its own Pipes technology, Peerlogic says it is now the only middleware company to extend both messaging and object technology to include enterprise directory services.
Peerlogic takes around 40 staff from the unit, mostly those based at ICL’s Manchester, UK offices. Alastair Quinn, formerly general manager of the group, becomes managing director of Peerlogic UK. The company won’t reveal how it is funding the deal, but says that it didn’t pay cash, as it did for the Dias technology. It promises more details over the next few months. Peerlogic says it has grown its staff from 35 in September to 85 today, and says it expects to have up to 200 staff within a few months.
Demand for directory services software has strengthened over the last few years, driven by e-commerce and the associated need for security, the company said. Pipes has its own real-time location services, and Corba has its Trader and naming services, both with some overlap to X.500 technology, on which ICL’s i500 is based. But i500 offers a persistent data store and is built to cope with large scale distributed installations, Peerlogic said.
ICL won a leading 28% share of market revenues in the X.500 market last year, followed by Siemens AG with 18% and Control Data Corp with 9%, according to figures from the Radicati Group. Revenues for the unit are said to have doubled over the last two years. Isocor Inc of Santa Monica, California, uses i500 as the basis for its own products, and ICL has a deal in place with Compaq Computer Corp (through the Digital Equipment Corp acquisition), although few details of its terms have been revealed. Fujitsu Ltd’s ICL, which is preparing for its flotation, has a new focus on systems and services, and is divesting itself of non-core businesses.
While the X.500 standard, part of the original ISO seven layer model interconnection scheme and originally driven by the telecommunications industry, has been overshadowed by newer LDAP lightweight directory access protocol and interconnect technologies, it continues to be used by large corporates, particularly in Europe. The design of LDAP was heavily influenced by the X.500 work, and modern X.500 implementations are now hybrids which typically also support LDAP. As for network operating system-oriented directory services, such as Novell Inc’s NDS and Microsoft Corp’s not yet released ActivX, Peerlogic says that full scalability for such products is at least two years away. The vendor neutral technology, which runs on NT, Sun and HP-UX Unix implementations, can interoperate with competing directories from Netscape Communications Corp, Novell and Microsoft.
Peerlogic says it won’t attempt a tightly coupled integration of its three product lines, and says it will continue to work with other people’s products, with each of its three lines continuing to be available separately. Integration work will be done using standard mechanisms and open interfaces, although Peerlogic says it will make it easier for customers to stick with its products over time by adding common configuration and management tools.
