The New York Times > Technology > I.B.M. Expected to Buy Start-Up to Advance Open-Source Strategy

The New York Times > Technology > I.B.M. Expected to Buy Start-Up to Advance Open-Source Strategy: "The Gluecode acquisition can also be seen as a defensive tactic for I.B.M, which ran the risk of ceding the lower end of the business application server market to others, like JBoss, another open-source start-up, which has grown rapidly recently.
Gluecode was founded in 2003 and, in March 2004 received $5 million from two venture capital firms, Palomar Ventures and Rustic Canyon Partners.
'We're very complementary to the strategy that WebSphere has now,' said Chet Kapoor, chief executive of Gluecode. 'They sell software at the high end, and we have a support and subscription business model for small and medium-sized businesses and departmental projects in big companies.' "

I don't believe IBM will be able to maintain the dept/SMB ... enterprise dichotomy for long, but the acquisition was probably a necessary risk given JBoss's expanding reach.