Liaison Grows Its Cloud with Acquisition of HubSpan

September 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

Liaison Technologies, a developer of security and data integration software that runs on IBM i and other platforms, has acquired Hubspan, a provider of a cloud-based business process management (BPM) integration platform.

You can think of HubSpan’s cloud, called the WebSpan SaaS Integration Platform, as an EDI translator on steroids. The hosted application does the grunt work of executing, choreographing, validating, and monitoring the flow of data and business documents among multiple parties. But WebSpan goes beyond traditional EDI translation or even newer FTP-based AS2 messaging to support the vast array of technologies and techniques used to integrate enterprise software in the financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, distribution, and ecommerce industries, including trading communities like RosettaNet and Ariba (which is in the process of being bought by SAP); product data synchronization services like GS1; and invocation of Web services via SOAP and REST.

Liaison already had a foot in the wider B2B integration world with Electronic Commerce Server (ECS), which supported many protocols, as well as managed file transfer (MFT) functionality. Liaison also inherited some legacy EDI translation software with its 2011 acquisition of nuBridges, which had previously acquired TrailBlazer Systems and its IBM i-focused software.

Lately, Liaison has been pushing the state of the art in encryption and particularly tokenization, which addresses some of the shortcomings and complications that result from encrypting large production databases. The company sees a lot of promise in its tokenization as a service (TaaS) offering, which enables companies to effectively sidestep some of the more onerous legal mandates surrounding encryption of sensitive data, like credit card numbers.

Its acquisition of HubSpan gives Liaison a more complete cloud. Not only can Liaison address companies’ security concerns with TaaS, but it can now offer a full array of hosted B2B integration and BPM services. Depending on the price that Liaison paid for HubSpan (which of course was not disclosed), this is a big win for Liaison, and helps to complete their vision for offering cloud-based data processing services.

Liaison cited HubSpan’s possession of “marquee” customers, and a “rapidly growing” partner channel as key motivators for the deal. It also liked HubSpan’s SSAE 16 and PCI DSS compliance and a “massively scalable” cloud-based MFT offering.