You wouldn’t know the mergers and acquisitions market on Wall Street was in the doldrums if you were just watching Progress Software Corp. this week.

First, Progress snapped up IonaTechnologies Inc., adding Iona’s Artix ESB technology and CORBA legacy customer base. Then on Friday Progress announced that it has also purchased Mindreef Inc., the privately-held vendor of testing and service validation tools for service-oriented architecture (SOA), for an undisclosed price.

The Progress acquisition of Mindreef almost got lost in the hoopla surrounding the purchase of Iona, wrote analyst Joe McKendrick on his ZDNet blog on Thursday. He pointed out the importance of Mindreef’s philosophy of reaching out with its tools to practically everyone involved in SOA development.

“Mindreef’s emphasis has been on enabling professionals from all sides of SOA - architects, developers, and managers - to better collaborate on service design and implementation,” McKendrick wrote.

Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst, ZapThink LLC., who earlier in the week said the Iona deal made good sense for Progress, also saw value in the Mindreef acquisition.

“Both the Mindreef and IONA deals are great moves for Progress,” Bloomberg said. “Governance, quality, and management are more important to SOA success than middleware is, so it’s a great sign that they’re adding SOA quality to the mix.”

Change management is a crucial piece of SOA that appears to be missing in many vendor offerings, the ZapThink analyst noted. 

“After all, unless you enable broad-based service consumption and composition in environments of continual change, which is what SOA is all about, you can’t have effective SOA. It’s surprising that more SOA infrastructure companies haven’t made a deeper investment in SOA governance, quality, and management solutions, since they will rapidly realize that the success of their SOA initiatives depend on successfully addressing those issues.”

 This week’s acquisitions of Iona and Mindreef were a win-win for Progress in Bloomberg’s view.

“Progress is doing a great job of rounding out its SOA offerings by adding Mindreef’s SOA quality solutions to the mix,” the ZapThink analyst said.

In a statement released on Friday regarding the Mindreef acquisition, Progress said it was adding three Mindreef tools to its Actional SOA Management product line:

• SOAPscope Server
• SOAPscope Architect
• SOAPscope Developer

Progress and Mindreef are planning a Webinar in mid-July to further explain how the products will fit together, according to McKendrick.

Pro wrestling legend Rowdy Roddy Piper immortalized the words “Just when they think they’ve got the answers, I change the questions.”

Now we at SearchSOA.com are asking you to do the same thing, sort of. It won’t involve wearing a kilt or smashing a coconut over anyone’s skull. We just want you to ask some good questions.

We’ve recently revamped our site experts roster and we’re looking to put them through their paces. The way it works is you ask a question and we send the question off to an expert to get you an answer. It’s a fairly illustrious list of folks:

• SOA standards and architecture - Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton Group
• SOA governance and BPM - Sri Nagabhirava, founder and chief architect nLeague Services
• SOA infrastructure - Dana Gardner, principal analyst Interarbor Solutions
• RIA and enterprise mashups - Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst ZapThink
• SOA testing and QA - Rami Jaamour, product manager of SOA solutions at Parasoft
• Data services - Larry Fulton, senior analyst at Forrester Research
• SOA development - Chris Haddad, vice president and service director at Burton Group

They’re already producing some top flight insight, like data integration best practices, where grid intersects SOA and the difference between WSDL 1.1 and 2.0. Yet good answers like that depend on good questions from the user community. We sift through heaping piles of “What’s the difference between an application server and a Web server?” (a perfectly legitimate question, but we answered it back in 2003) in order to get some of the top minds in the SOA space the best questions the user base can generate.

The process for submitting a question is simple. Just go to the topic where your question fits and click on “Pose a Question.” That will take you to a question submission form. After that, it’s as simple as typing in your query. Keep us busy. We like it that way.