Monthly Archives: April 2007

Mars Surveyor, the most expensive software error?

Posted on by Carlos Sanchez
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The Mars Surveyor failure was caused by software updates. A $154 million software error.

Was this the most expensive software error ever? actually no, seems that the Ariane 5 explosion in 1996 wins with $370 million. That of course if we don’t count the loss of human life as happened with the Therac-25 radiation therapy machine that killed at least five patients between 1985-1987 due to radiation overdose, or with the MIM-104 Patriot missile in 1991 that prevented the interception of a Iraqui Scud missile that killed 28 US soldiers at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, due to a failure in the clock, a failure that had already been discovered, but unfortunately no updated software was provided to the soldiers. The manufacturer sent instructions to work around the problem, but were not clear enough and therefore not properly used.

Saving money in testing can be very expensive!

More info in the wikipedia, the most famous computer bugs.

IONA acquires LogicBlaze

Posted on by Carlos Sanchez
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Finally it’s public, IONA has acquired LogicBlaze, one of SimulaLabs portfolio companies (the company I work for), with whom I was sharing offices all this time. Congratulations!

From Debbie’s blog:

I am so excited that the news became public today about IONA’s acquisition of LogicBlaze. Celtix already incorporates ServiceMix and ActiveMQ as part of our open source ESB, and this acquisition brings deep domain expertise on these opensource projects. As many of you know, I personally have worked very closely with the LogicBlaze team over the past year, and I believe that this acquisition will accelerate the adoption of open source SOA infrastructure.

The announcement and FAQs are available on the IONA Celtix site.

Here are some of the highlights:

– the transaction closed last Friday, April 6th, and the terms of the transaction were not disclosed

– LogicBlaze provides business integration solutions based on Open Source technologies. The company was founded by integration architects with extensive experience as leaders in OpenSource projects for integration, messaging, and enterprise servicebus technologies.

– LogicBlaze is most well-known for their leadership and contributions to the Apache ActiveMQ and Apache Incubator ServiceMix projects.

– all of the 9 LogicBlaze employees will join IONA, including the three founders, Hiram Chirino, Rob Davies, and James Strachan

– Approximately 25 active LogicBlaze customers will become IONA customers as part of the acquisition

– LogicBlaze’s customers include leaders infinancial services, government, and telecommunications industries. This is consistent and closely aligned with IONA’s existing customer base

– IONA will continue marketing and selling theservice subscription offerings for the ActiveMQ and ServiceMix projects for which the company is known and respected. IONA also incorporates code from ActiveMQ in Artix and code from both ActiveMQ and ServiceMix in Celtix.

– LogicBlaze has a subscription support and training and consulting revenue model that is similar to IONA’s opensource revenue model

– the key assets as a result of this acquisitionare: respected Open Source experts and leaders in the Open Source community (the people of LogicBlaze),  intellectual property, and existing customers that have adopted Open Source technologies to support their SOA deployments.

– LogicBlaze will not operate as a separate company, but will become an integral part of IONA’s Open Source business.