WebMethods makes another SOA buy
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(InfoWorld) - Business integration suite vendor WebMethods is on the acquisition trail again, this time looking to pick up expertise in SOA (service-oriented architecture) governance through the planned purchase of Infravio. WebMethods announced Monday that it has reached a definitive agreement to buy Infravio for about $38 million in cash and expects the deal to close later this month. Infravio is the vendor's second SOA-focused acquisition in recent weeks. Last month,Â WebMethods purchasedÂ most of the assets of semantic metadata management technology company Cerebra for an undisclosed sum. As the SOA market continues to consolidate, larger players are busily picking off smaller firms, especially those with particular areas of focus, be they around technologies or specific industries. Infravio's registry, repository and governance products help companies enforce policies and practices to better control the design, development and deployment of their SOA projects. WebMethods plans to integrate Infravio's offerings into future versions of its Fabric SOA suite by the fourth quarter of this year. The Fabric suite brings together tools to help users improve the management of their business processes within an SOA framework and gain a better understanding of how their existing IT assets, including Web services, function and interoperate. WebMethods plans to continue to sell and support stand-alone versions of Infravio's products both before and after the completion of the acquisition. Infravio customers include Lockheed Martin, Providence Health System, and Sprint Nextel. Infravio's software will help improve and add to WebMethods' capabilities in a number of areas including automatic content validation, service-level agreement management, security enforcement and versioning and impact analysis. Established in 1999, privately-held Infravio employs around 65 staff, 50 of whom are developers in its offshore unit in Chennai, India.
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New products to build Web services with Eclipse, e-commerce apps with Amazon's technology, and more.
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(InfoWorld) - Software AG will adopt the webMethods name for its Crossvision range of SOA (services oriented architecture) products, executives said Friday, outlining how they will integrate staff and products following the company'sÂ acquisition of webMethods. To eliminate one of the few overlaps in their product lines, Software AG will adopt webMethods' BPM (business process management) offering, and stop selling Fujitsu's Interstage BPM software, which it has distributed since December 2004. However, Software AG will support its existing Interstage customers for at least five years, said Peter KÃ¼rpick, board member responsible for research and development. Another area of overlap is in SOA management and governance, where KÃ¼rpick expects to see Software AG's CentraSite SOA registry and repository combined with webMethods' recently acquired Infravio SOA governance tools by the end of the year. "We are strong in managing metadata, and they are strong in governance policies, rules and regulations," he said. The combined product will likely retain the CentraSite name, he said. All other areas of the companies' product lines are complementary, and there will be no need for customers to migrate, KÃ¼rpick said. KÃ¼rpick will lead the integration of the companies' product development teams, where he expects managers from both companies will take senior roles. It won't be like a classic merger where "you own the body but the head and legs are gone," he said. He sees little need for layoffs as the product development teams are combined: "We already have an R&D force that is 50 percent low-cost, mostly in India, some in Bulgaria, so we already have a good cost structure," he said. Although there may be little scope for payroll savings, CEO Karl-Heinz Streibich expects earnings to improve this year as the two sales forces -- which will remain separate at least through the end of 2007 -- exploit opportunities to cross-sell the two product ranges. The combined entity's revenue will grow organically by 10 percent over the next 12 to 15 months, he said.
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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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(InfoWorld) - As any developer can tell you, creating interoperability between SOA components and existing IT environments isnât trivial. It requires a lot of effort and coding. But IBM says it has the antidote for the IT headache: composite business services in the form of wrappers around existing IT applications. Big Blueâs strategy to create reusable SOA services is largely built around technologies and tools that the company received from its August acquisition of Webify Solutions, a vendor of SOA software and services. Webify provides hundreds of industry-specific, prebuilt standards-based accelerators, tools, and frameworks. Its offerings help solve business problems that are specific to a given industry, such as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliance for the health care industry and ACORD (Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development) standards in the insurance industry. Within IBM, Webifyâs technology provides the basis for WebSphere Business Services Fabric (IBMâs SOA platform for modeling, assembly, and deployment of business services), says Brett MacIntyre, vice president for composite services development at IBM.                                                     âWebify (software) has given us the fabric, the view across the industry of common services used within the industry, and the tools and the methods with which to build these composite business services,â MacIntyre says. Webify also brought relationships with customers in the health care and insurance industries, and a portfolio of about 12 composite business services in the insurance and health care industries, MacIntyre says. Composite business services built by IBM will interoperate through the standard framework from Webify, with ontologies and data models associated with an industry added on top of the WebSphere Business Services Fabric to create a particular component, MacIntyre says. âFor example, a core data model that the insurance companies in the U.S. work with is part of the overall business fabric,â he says. Webify tools, processes and methodologies will also play a key role at SOA Solutions Centers in Beijing and Pune, India, says Jeby Cherian, the head of IBMâs Global Business Solutions Center, one of three organizations IBM set up to create reusable software assets.
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Neon Systems, a provider of mainframe integration solutions for Microsoft .Net and Java applications, has acquired ClientSoft for $10.5 million in cash and the rights to purchase 1.1 million shares of Neon stock. The privately held ClientSoft specializes in secure, high-performance integration solutions for mainframe Web services. The purchase, which adds 180 customers to Neon's base of 300 customers, brings together Neon's Shadow z/Services and ClientSoft's ServiceBuilder product lines and should provide customers with a robust set of solutions to support service-oriented architectures (SOAs).
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Survey says business just doesn't 'get' it Service-oriented architectures (SOAs) are the subject de jour with IT vendors, who have been using the term as if the concept has been totally understood by the buying audience and is well along the way to general implementation.â¦
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Software AG will adopt the webMethods name for its Crossvision range of SOA (services oriented architecture) products, executives said Friday, outlining how they will integrate staff and products following the company'sÂ acquisition of webMethods.
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EBay Inc. and Taiwanese portal operator PCHome Online Inc. announced their newÂ joint venture Web auction siteÂ on Wednesday, an effort aimed at competing with market leader Yahoo Taiwan Inc.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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Software AG plans to unveil details of Version 7.1 of the webMethods business process management suite on Wednesday, along with a new enterprise service bus (ESB) and a supply chain performance optimization tool.
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(InfoWorld) - In a little more than a decade, BEA Systems built itself into a top middleware player and one of the leading lights in SOA. Thatâs a good thing. Revenues at BEA are soaring (up 19 percent in the latest quarter) and the companyâs stock price rose around 50 percent in the last year. But playing in a hot space such as SOA is a classic instance of having the tiger by its tail. As CEO Alfred Chuang told InfoWorld Executive Editor at Large Eric Knorr in a recent interview, the company still needs to move aggressively to avoid being left high and dry by rapid shifts in the technology landscape. InfoWorld: What do you think is the future of enterprise software and where does BEA fits into it? Alfred Chuang: You will have vendors like us that will be selling platforms (and) application vendors that will be selling application components, yet they will be assembled on the fly by an end-user. End-users will be using a tool -- or they will be using templates or processes -- that will represent what their environment is. They can always go back to change the process on the fly, yet the components will continue to be usable within those processes. One big advantage: Youâll be able to upgrade component functionality without affecting the process itself. Today, this is a total mess. IW: Where do you think SaaS (software as a service) will fit in to this vision?                                                     AC: Like when you rent a car, you donât really care much about your car. When people drive a rent-a-car, they drive very differently from when they drive their own car. You see the craziest man driving around the hills of San Francisco in a Ford Taurus -- itâs likely to be me -- and Iâm killing the brakes coming down the streets of San Francisco, flying over the hills, because I donât give a crap. Now, if itâs my own car that Iâm driving, itâs very different. Iâll be parking at the corner parking station and making sure nobody can possibly ding me. There will be people who want full flexibility, so all they want is a rental car. There are people who will want ownership so badly ... that they will buy the software. SaaS will be able to attract small groups in large corporations, or small organizations, period. I think a successful company, including ourselves, even at the middleware layer, will have to offer both to people. IW: So youâre not ruling out offering some of what BEA offers now as a service? AC: Not only am I not ruling it out, we have to do it.Â  Iâm saying itâs not going to be 100 percent of the world. IW: What about the effect of the open source model? AC: Open source is the ultimate tool to keep us honest, especially on pricing. Linux is a good example. I spent the first half of my career from the very beginning of Sun until they were several billion dollars in size. For the longest time, Solaris was the reason people would buy a very, very expensive box. All of a sudden, people did not notice -- especially the people at Sun -- that the API was no longer dependent on Solaris. Weâre not calling any of the functions directly on the operating system anymore. They are programming that to things like J2EE. So overnight, what happened is someone came up with a computer running an operating system that J2EE can run on. Literally, thereâs no porting, thereâs no changing, nothing. In fact, the same application is being extended by buying more CPUs running Linux. Linux totally commoditized Unix in the marketplace. Open source serves [another] very important purpose, I think, which is education. SOA [service-oriented architecture] is lifting us to a different level. Look at the application server or integration software. You really want to educate developers? Let them tinker with whatâs inside so they fully understand what theyâre dealing with. A smart vendor will always watch whether their software is being commoditized. And itâs not wrong to be commoditized as long as your volume catches up with it. You must continue to innovate in abstractions at higher and higher levels. The demand is unlimited at this point in time. Look at our appetite for Internet applications. It is absolutely insatiable. We want more and more and more. I want to do everything on the Internet. If Iâm booking an airline ticket -- I just came back from Asia last night -- I did the whole thing in my car on my 3G BlackBerry.
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Not all soap operas are on TV. case in point: I used to work as a programmer for a midsize trucking company Iâll call âUS Freightline,â with yards and offices scattered around the Chicago area. Not only was âJoe,â the IT manager (and my boss) a good guy, but, as it happens, his wife âJenniferâ and I were old college pals.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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WSO2 is offering its open-source WSO2 Mashup Server product, which leverages JavaScript and Web services in assembling mashups, on Monday. In positioning the product for use by JavaScript developers, the company is looking to enable delivery of more functional mashups than can be built with alternative GUI-based tools. A hosted online version of Mashup Server, called Mooshup.com, also will be launched Monday as a community site for developing and sharing mashups.With WSO2 Mashup Server 1.0, WSO2 anticipates a confluence of Web 2.0 social capabilities and enterprise needs. "Basically, what we believe is that enterprise IT is going to go more toward a social enterprise structure where the IT offerings are not only by IT staff but by anybody in the enterprise," said WSO2 Chairman/CEO Sanjiva Weerawarana.But WSO2 is targeting Web developers who can write JavaScript. "The main purpose of WSO2 Mashup Server is to allow developers to author new Web services in JavaScript," said Jonathan Marsh, WSO2 director of mashup technologies. These Web services can be consumed within other enterprise tools and exposed as an RSS or Atom feed, he said.WSO's mashup platform is not intended to complete head-to-head with more GUI-based business level mashup products. "There's a feeling that we had that limiting yourself to a GUI right off the bat gets you started very quickly, but you quickly reach walls that block you from doing precisely what you'd like to do," Marsh said. Eventually, users of those tools have to resort to JavaScript, he said.Mashups can be authored within the administrative UI, with a text editor, or with any popular IDE, WSO2 said."It's an interesting aspect to choose JavaScript as sort of the primary scripting language," said analyst Michael Cote of RedMonk. JavaScript has been primarily used in AJAX-style (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) development, Cote noted. But plenty of people are familiar with JavaScript, he added.Built on the WSO2 Web services application Server, WSO2 Mashup Server can use information from Web services, HTML, and feeds and publishes the result as a Web service. Each service has metadata to simplify consumption by other mashups and Web services clients. Content and presentation are separated through XML and Web services to enable a service to be consumed by another mashup.Web service and UI artifacts are generated, such as WSDL, REST URLS and JavaScript stubs. Services can be composed from such sources as Web services, RSS, and HTML.Additionally, services can be accessed using a request-response pattern or be programmed to run over a long period of time. For example, a mashup initiating instant messaging alerts can warn transport companies about possible delays when there is snow.By leveraging WSO2's application server and registry, the mashup server gains capabilities for enterprise security, reliability, and governance, WSO2 said.Mooshup.com is being launched in a beta version. "The purpose is to help us drive downloads of Mashup Server," Marsh said.WSO2 sells support services for Mashup Server, with prices ranging from $2,000 per server per year to $8,000 per server per year, depending on levels of support.
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(InfoWorld) - And then there were none. Two weeks ago, these pages noted the dwindling number of dedicated SOA registry vendors, amid rapid consolidation in the SOA space. BEA had acquired Flashline, which left Infravio as one of the few registry vendors standing. Then, a week ago, Infravio too was snapped up by webMethods for an undisclosed amount. In the deal, webMethods will gain Infravioâs X-Registry Platform, an advanced registry/repository that emphasizes policy lifecycle management. The capabilities of X-Registry, which also help IT govern the development and runtime interaction of services, should be highly useful to webMethods as it moves more aggressively into the crowded SOA arena. Consolidation among SOA software providers has been rampant. In January, Mercury bought Systinet. A lesser-known player in the same space, Flashline, was purchased by BEA last month. The remaining pure-play of note is LogicLibrary, whose Logidex registry/repository emphasizes governance of software development assets. So is it âgame overâ for smaller SOA players? Not by a long shot, according to Miko Matsumura, vice president of technology standards at Infravio. Matsumura believes the industry is only in the âthird or fourth inningâ of the SOA game. âThe âplayersâ in this one will be pretty good-sized, so these acquisitions are really players getting suited up for the big game,â he said.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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Davey Shafik's weblog has a new posting today - the third part of his Automatic Web Services series.
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Business Objects SA's share price surged in Paris Thursday morning, as rumors swirled of a takeover bid from IBM Corp. or Oracle Corp.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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InfoWorld - Software AG will adopt the webMethods name for its Crossvision range of SOA (services oriented architecture) products, executives said Friday, outlining how they will integrate staff and products following the company&#39;s&#160;acquisition of webMethods.