The always insightful James Governor just had an interesting post about Adobe aquiring a company that builds an Eclipse-based Javascript editor. He made an off-the-cuff comment that building Eclipse based software makes M&A a lot easier.
You know I think James has a point but I would also add, building Eclipse based products makes partnering a lot easier too. Case in point, this week at Eclipse World I was getting a demo of OptimalJ from Compuware. OptimalJ is primarily an MDA tool with some UML modeling capabilities. To provide a complete set of diagram editors they also include the MagicDraw UML. Both are Eclipse based so MagicDraw just shows up as a menu item in OptimalJ. Integration made easy the Eclipse way.
Another example at Eclipse World was Genuitec’s announcement that MyEclipse is going to be bundled with Hitachi’s uCosminexus server.
Of course there is also an older example of BEA purchasing M7 and there are many others.
From a business point of view, Eclipse might just be making it easier for partnering and M&A. An interesting trend to watch….
