After raising $11 million from Massachusetts investors, Active Endpoints Inc. has quietly dumped Shelton as its headquarters locale in favor of the Route 128 high-tech corridor ringing Boston.
Active Endpoints retains a development office with an estimated 25 employees at 3 Enterprise Drive in Shelton, but now identifies Waltham, Mass., as its new headquarters. A spokeswoman did not immediately return a call seeking additional information.
Active Endpoint”™s software allows developers to program swiftly Web-based systems to support business transactions, using a technology standard called Business Process Execution Language (BPEL).
Area customers include Norwalk-based Xerox Corp., Yale University in New Haven and MasterCard International of Purchase, N.Y.
Founded in January 2003, Active Endpoints was the third startup launched by Fred Holahan and Chris Keller.
The pair previously teamed up on LexiBridge Corp., which was acquired in 1998 by Level3 Communications; and GemLogic, which was acquired in 1999 by a company that itself was folded into Waltham-based Novell Inc. ”“ where both worked early in their careers.
Keller remains with Active Endpoints as vice president of product development, but Holahan is no longer listed as a company executive or director. Holahan could not immediately be reached for comment on his future plans.
Since filling its vacant CEO slot with Mark Taber last August, Active Endpoints has filled out the rest of its senior executive ranks with Waltham managers.
Taber previously led sales at Waltham-based DataPower. With network devices that similarly speed the alignment of business and Web processes, DataPower was gobbled up in 2005 by Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM Corp., which paid $100 million.
Active Endpoints and DataPower have shared a common investor: Atlas Venture Ltd., which was joined in the Active Points financing round by North Bridge Venture Partners.
Even as Active Endpoints operations splits in two, the Waltham brain trust is still depending on their Shelton developers for a new “visual orchestration system” the company plans to reveal this quarter.
In a January letter to customers and software developers, Taber said the fundamental barrier to widespread adoption of Web-transaction tools is the habit of companies to “segregate” software applications.
“The process of decomposing problems into manageable pieces makes it nearly impossible to reassemble those pieces ”¦ that were the target for automation in the first place,” Taber wrote. “Using piece-parts technology to reassemble newly deployed services just doesn”™t make sense.”
