IBM sweats acquisitions for bumper SOA rollout
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Work hard for the money IBM today rolled out 23 updated product and 11 professional services offerings for service oriented architectures (SOAs). Some use technology from recent and recent-ish acquisitions, Webify, BuildForge and Bowstreet.â¦
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IBM said Wednesday it is expanding its broad SOA (service-oriented architecture) portfolio with the acquisition of AptSoft, a maker of business event processing software.AptSoft&#39;s products will sit in IBM&#39;s WebSphere line. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.Also known as complex event processing (CEP), business event processing is seen as a key technology driver for the next generation of SOA. The software analyzes vast amounts of system events in real time, searching for trends and anomalies -- &quot;complex events&quot; -- that may impact the business, and triggers a response process if one is found.For example, the technology could be used by an online gaming site to spot malfeasance among the torrent of transactions that occur each second, or by a trading firm to track minute changes in stock price activity among various markets, IBM said in a statement.IBM executives are planning to reveal more about the acquisition during a conference call Wednesday at 1:15 p.m. Eastern Time.Other companies in the CEP/BEP market include Tibco and Streanbase.
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WebLayers, the market leader for automated SOA governance, today  announced at the IBM Rational Software Development Conference its  support for the new IBM Rational Asset Manager offering.
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Mainframe systems are playing a key role in many SOA (service-oriented architecture) projects, according to a study released this week by IBM user group SHARE.
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IBM&#39;s planned purchase of Venetica provides Big Blue with one more piece in its on-demand computing strategy. The challenge will be to seamlessly meld Venetica&#39;s unstructured-data expertise with structured-data management.
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Over the next several weeks, IBM (NYSE: IBM) will roll out new technologies within its content management portfolio, with a focus on managing unstructured data with improved XML handling.
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InfoWorld - Hoping to speed acceptance of its service-oriented architecture initiative, IBM at last has rolled out a new service to help corporate users shape their projects to better fit their business goals.
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More process IBM has announced its Rational Software Delivery Platform 7.0 for desktops, to help developers design and deliver service oriented architectures (SOAs).â¦
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IBM&#39;s affections for service-oriented architectures deepened today when Big Blue offered details on the impending version 6 release of WebSphere Application Server.
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Users on hand for this week's Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference say a move to SOA can yield substantial rewards -- after a company has first navigated the problems such a move can uncover.
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(InfoWorld) - Itâs virtualization to the rescue again -- this time with large-scale SOA deployments. Tibco Software on Monday launched Tibco ActiveMatrix, a service virtualization platform to help enterprises deal with SOA as deployments grow larger. The new platform includes a service grid, policy management software, and a UDDI-based registry, derived from Tibcoâs Project Matrix initiative. âWith SOA, the challenges that companies are facing are really around the deployment, management, and ultimately the virtualization of services,â Matthew Quinn, vice president of product strategy at Tibco, said. âIf you have two services, you know where those services are and what platform theyâre built on. If you have 500 to 1,000 services, you lose a lot of that control.â ActiveMatrix provides foundation technology for deploying an SOA. Virtualization enables communication with vast numbers of services without having to know what machine they exist on or what type of software container they use. Governance is enhanced because service and policy configuration and management are done centrally for each application server, enterprise service bus or orchestration engine, Tibco said. A centerpiece of the rollout is Tibco ActiveMatrix Service Grid. It serves as a distributed platform for deployment and managing Java, .Net and other services as composite applications. ActiveMatrix provides an integrated vision for application and integration platforms, builds in virtualization layers and addresses composite application programming, said analyst Randy Heffner of Forrester Research. The product also makes the protocols used in an SOA transparent, Heffner said. The three products are available now. Prices for a single product start at about $40,000. Tibco plans to expand its ActiveMatrix product line next year, though company officials declined to provide specifics.ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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Taking aim at mid-market businesses, as well as its competition in the server space, IBM (NYSE: IBM) is delivering two new Unix-based products designed to meet the company's cost-conscious Express guidelines.
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IBM sought to beef up its software tools portfolio on Tuesday, announcing plans to acquire Systemcorp, a privately held maker of project management applications.
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The WS-Management spec is part of the effort to improve Sun-Microsoft system interoperability. But IBM is taking a different road.
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Updates Filenet IBM's appetite for acquiring software companies shows no signs of diminishing. Last year, the company conservatively spent $3.6bn, adding 12 companies or just their assets to its $18bn middleware business during 2006.â¦
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IBM has unveiled two new Rational development tools and and a Tivoli applications management offering. They can be used separately or jointly to boost the quality of a service-oriented architecture.
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A new report from Forrester Research declares that the wave of mega-acquisitions in the software industry is over for now, though big vendors will continue to snap up smaller firms as they round out their portfolios.&quot;We do expect more consolidation to occur, but predict that the acquisitions of&#160;Business Objects by SAP,&#160;Cognos by IBM, and&#160;Oracle&#39;s renewed bid for BEA&#160;will be the last hurrahs in this cycle for super-sized acquisitions within the software industry of vendors with more than $1 billion in revenues and deal sizes of $5 billion or more,&quot; analysts R. &quot;Ray&quot; Wang and Andrew Bartels said in the report.The analysts noted that the market could see hardware vendors like Cisco make major software buys, but said such scenarios do not constitute software vendor consolidation in the traditional sense.Three major factors will staunch the flow of megadeals, they argued.Citing projections showing double-digit growth in global software revenue for 2007 and 2008, Wang and Bartels argued that vendors will not need to grow through large purchases in the immediate future, and will instead choose &quot;organic growth and spot acquisitions&quot; to satisfy shareholders.Second, the credit crunch caused by the subprime mortgage meltdown is making it harder to borrow large sums. And thirdly, there are simply fewer large ISVs to buy, the analysts noted. They identified 18 large independent software vendors that are potential targets and said many of those can be eliminated because of &quot;poor fit with strategy, financial or business questions, high price, or other considerations that stymie acquisitions.&quot;IBM will be the most aggressive with acquisitions and may go after packaged applications, a field it has largely avoided to date, according to the report.&quot;The most likely scenario involves smaller acquisitions of key ISVs building on Websphere. But if IBM makes a move for packaged apps to compete with Oracle, top apps targets could include IBM partners like Infor, IFS, Lawson, or even SAP. Industry-specific targets could include Amdocs, Deltek, and Primavera Systems,&quot; the authors state.Wang said he was comfortable making this prediction despite IBM&#39;s insistence that it has no designs on packaged applications. &quot;Last year, they spent the whole year saying they were never going to buy a BI vendor,&quot; Wang said, referring to IBM&#39;s deal to buy Cognos.As for Oracle, it will buy companies tied to middleware and vertical business applications, according Forrester. &quot;We expect Oracle to make midsize bets in key verticals like project base solutions (e.g., Computer Methods International or CMiC, Manhattan CenterStone), financial services (e.g., Temenos), retail (e.g., Escalate), and telecom, utilities, and public services (e.g., SunGard).SAP will make small purchases to flesh out NetWeaver, according to the analysts. These may include vendors of user interface tooling, master data management software and business process management products, they said, citing SAP&#39;s recent buy of Yasu Technologies, which makes a business rules engine, as evidence. &quot;Additional acquisitions could come from existing partners like AmberPoint SOA Management, F5, Magic Software Enterprises, OpenText, Savvion, and Worksoft,&quot; they added.Among the big four players, Microsoft will be &quot;the least active&quot; in terms of acquisitions, according to Forrester. &quot;Expect the Redmond giant to make selective acquisitions that do not conflict too much with its ecosystem strategy,&quot; they wrote. Possible targets include &quot;middleware solution providers like VisionWare in the customer data integration space, Riversand Technologies in the personal information manager space, and Web 2.0 specialists that enhance its Information Workplace platform.&quot;Software executives offered mixed reactions. Tom Hogan, senior vice president of HP&#39;s software division, said his firm will likely continue to acquire companies, but is focused more on organic growth. Last year HP spent about 70 percent of its roughly $3.5 billion research and development budget on software, according to Hogan.&quot;That&#39;s a lot of internal R&amp;D that should ... generate commercially viable software over the next couple of years,&quot; he said. &quot;If you want to really hit the home run for shareholders, you build it yourself. When we can&#39;t build it because we don&#39;t have the DNA or the time, then we will turn to strategic M&amp;A.&quot;Executives at smaller vendors offered other takes. Informatica, a data integration vendor, is competing with the likes of IBM but enjoying strong growth, reporting this week that its 2007 revenues rose 21 percent to $391 million. CEO Sohaib Abbasi said mergers and acquisitions in the software industry should be examined beyond the size of a given deal.The pace of consolidation is much more aggressive in established categories like business applications, he noted. &quot;At the other extreme is emerging categories such as software as a service, where there is no consolidation to speak of.&quot;Informatica is doing well thanks to the relative newness of its space, he said: &quot;We are in the very early days of the data integration market. Half of our deals are uncontested.&quot;Patrick Durbin, CEO of the portfolio-management-software company Planview, said in a recent interview that his privately held firm, which has 450 customers, has &quot;critical mass&quot; and can survive as an independent.Durbin&#39;s firm partners with various companies, including Microsoft. He couldn&#39;t say for sure what would happen if it or another firm came knocking: &quot;The moment I tell you I&#39;ll never sell is the moment someone&#39;s going to back up a truck with a boatload of money.&quot;