Software AG outlines plans for webMethods products
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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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Google is set to unveil the Gears open source tool set for developing Web applications that can be used offline.
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(InfoWorld) - WebMethods on Monday will roll out the webMethods Fabric 7.0 suite for business process integration and SOA, adding a registry, metadata management and an AJAX developer tool. The suite keys in on business process management and productivity improvements, the company said. Included in Version 7.0 are component products such as webMethods Designer, which features an Eclipse-based development environment for modeling and managing business processes. WebMethods Designer offers a drag-and-drop composition tool for codeless development of AJAX-based composite applications. "[Designer] enables business analysts and developers to cooperatively design and build business process models from the services that are available within the SOA," said Marc Breissinger, webMethods chief technology officer. WebMethods Designer is part of webMethods for BPM, a business process management product that provides for the lifecycle of process development and management, the company said. In Version 7.0, webMethods for BPM features business rules management from Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor and a searchable metadata library derived from Cerebra assets. WebMethods bought Cerebra assets in August. The library utilizes Resource Description Framework and Web Ontology Language to establish relationships between IT assets, including services, process models, business rules and documents. This lets users find the right asset for a specific application. WebMethods Fabric 7.0 also adds webMethods Infravio X-Registry, serving as a service repository and offering governance capabilities for exposed services. Also featured is webMethods Infravio X-Broker, providing runtime monitoring, mediation and management of Web services in an SOA. Infravio was acquired by webMethods in September. Another highlight in the suite is webMethods Optimize, for business activity monitoring (BAM). It is being enhanced in Version 7.0 with richer business visualization, the company said. "[Optimize] allows you to analyze how well your processes are running in your production environment and also predict when those processes will behave abnormally," Breissinger said. With Fabric 7.0, webMethods unifies SOA, BPM and BAM, an analyst said. "Fabric 7.0 is impressive because the integration, SOA, BPM, and BAM tools seem to hang together as a usable suite," said analyst Bill Swanton, vice president of research at AMR Research, in an e-mail. "Most other vendors are either offering only part of this stack or are still in the process of integrating the various companies they acquired. There is a focus on the BPM capabilities, which is the real source of value in SOA." Enterprise service bus capabilities featured as part of webMethods Enterprise Services Platform will not be upgraded to the 7.0 release of Fabric until next summer. That product will offer extended support for specifications such as SOAP 1.2. In the meantime, users can deploy the new products in the suite with the existing Version 6.5 of Enterprise Services Platform. Prices for a single product in the suite begin at approximately $100,000.
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(InfoWorld) - BEA Systems on Monday is launching its BEA Workshop Studio 3.3 developer tools platform, featuring Web Folder Mapping. Although the platform upgrade is considered minor by BEA, the company is highlighting Web Folder Mapping. This feature allows developers to assemble source files in a folder organization that matches the needs of a development team, not in a structure required by the server or IDE, said Bill Roth, vice president of the Workshop group at BEA. The same feature is known as "split development directory" in BEA's WebLogic Server application server. Productivity is key to version 3.3. "The simple read is that this is an update that will better allow companies who have large development staffs and are working on large code bases to be more productive," Roth said in an e-mail. Other improvements in version 3.3 include: * Inclusion of the Eclipse Web Tools Platform 1.5.2, which is a bug fix release.Â  Formerly, Web Tools Project 1.5.1 was offered. * An upgrade from the the Kodo 4.0 persistence engine to Kodo 4.1. * Support for the Spring 2.0 Java framework. * Support for opening .tld and .tag files located in Java Archive files. * Minor bug fixes and general improvements.
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FRANKFURT/BOSTON  - SAP AG  will unveil  on Wednesday a line of business management programs to be  delivered over the Web, becoming the first major software  company to make a big bet on software as a service.
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InfoWorld - Software AG has bought the application modernization activities of Jacada, adding to its portfolio of tools for prolonging the life of mainframe applications by giving them a Web interface.
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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.
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InfoWorld - In search of new markets and customers, SAP AG is developing a new breed of hosted, on-demand products and looking at ways to make its complex business software easier to use.
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SAP AG will unveil on  Wednesday a line of business management programs to be  delivered over the Web, becoming the first major software  company to make a big bet on software as a service.
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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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TechWeb - CEO Jonathan Schwartz outlines his company's vision for supplying existing and future Web 2.0 companies with the open source tools they'll need.
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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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InfoWorld - In recent months, the&#160;acquisition of SOA player webMethods&#160;has been the dominant news coming out of Software AG, but the middleware company also continues to hone its mainframe software and strategy.
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Integration software company WebMethods builds out its SOA product line with Infravio's registry.
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SAP AG  on Wednesday  introduced a long-delayed line of Web-based business management  software for mid-sized companies, which is at the heart of a  strategy to accelerate the company's sales and compete in the  Internet software arena where smaller rivals are ahead.
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(InfoWorld) - SAP's planned suite of hosted midmarket applications will be available in select markets later this year. The company will offer more details on pricing and functionality after the Cebit trade show in March, according to CEO Henning Kagermann. Kagermann spoke about the new hosted product, known internally as A1S, with reporters at the company's headquarters in Walldorf, Germany. A1S will target midmarket customers who seek an inexpensive, easy-to-deploy, low-risk suite of business applications including ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management). The on-demand product will be available as a monthly subscription, giving smaller, cost-sensitive companies the flexibility to test the service and drop it if they don't like it. The new offering comes asÂ SAP moves to capture a larger shareÂ of the huge but cost-sensitive segment for midmarket companies that are showing interest in hosted business applications such as those offered by Salesforce.com. Kagermann referred to A1S as an "entirely new product" that will not be a hosted version of the company's All-in-One product. All-in-One is a slimmed down version of mySAP Business Suite, which is designed for large enterprises. The hosted offering will be a highly preconfigured, "off-the-shelf" product that gives companies a range of applications with limited flexibility to tweak their functionality, he said. "To drive the price down, the product must be highly standardized," Kagermann said. The need to offer a set of standardized functions, he said, also means "less choice" of options to customize the product, he added. By narrowly limiting product customization and thus complexity, SAP and its partners will be able to deploy the offering much faster, Kagermann said. Fewer consultants will be necessary, resulting in lower costs. SAP aims to squeeze the new hosted offering between two of its existing products targeting small and medium-size businesses (SMBs): All-in-One and Business One. As part of the company's assault on the global SMB market, A1S will target businesses with between 100 and 1,000 employees, while All-in-One will focus on companies with between 1,000 and 2,500 employees and Business One between 10 and 100. The rollout of the new hosted service will not steal customers from Business One, an inexpensive offering that is also highly preconfigured, Kagermann said. On the contrary, "we expect more than 50,000 of our targeted customer base of 100,000 by 2010 to be Business One customers," he said. For customers that want more functions and greater flexibility to customize the software, All-in-One is the preferred product, Kagermann said. SAP currently has 39,000 customers. Kagermann expects demand for the hosted service to be strongest in the U.S., which is "ahead of Europe" in takeup of on-demand services. Pricing of the service will be highly transparent, he said, but declined to provide details. Nor would he divulge the name of the new service. "We are currently in talks with customers and partners on numerous issues, including pricing and functionality," Kagermann said. "It's too early to talk details just yet."
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(InfoWorld) - A potpourri of Java client application technologies is on the agenda at the Desktop Matters conference in San Jose, Calif. on Friday, where the desktop gets top billing over the Web. Again dominating the discussion, as was the case on Thursday, are technologies pertaining to the Swing desktop client platform for Java. Presentations are featured on such projects as the Spring Rich Client Project, jMatter, and SwiXml. The desktop can be a better option than the Web in some circumstances, one attendee said. "For certain types of applications, desktop's the only way to go," said Rob Abbe, chief software architect at Captovation, which develops document capture software. He cited applications that need to interface with peripherals like high-speed scanners as an example. "The Web would be better [as a deployment choice] when the footprint needs to remain low [like] in situations where administrative policies would prevent people from installing desktop applications," Abbe said. One technology featured, the open-source Spring Rich Client Project, shares code with the popular Spring application framework for Java but is geared to rich client applications. "There are hundreds of major companies using this for very large and significant production applications," said Jim Moore, a consultant at Interface21, which oversees Spring technologies. The mission of the project is to provide an elegant way to build rich client applications that leverage the Spring framework, he said. The initial focus is support for Swing applications, according to the project's Web site. Another open-source project, jMatter, is built for developing applications for small businesses. It leverages Naked Objects Architectural Pattern, which presents new ideas on how to build applications, said Eitan Suez, author of jMatter and president of Uptodata. "I'm on a mission to get these ideas out," Suez said. "JMatter is a manifestation of these ideas and it's a framework that I think empowers the developers to focus on their customers' needs without having to worry or spend [an] inordinate amount of time on plumbing or framework or spending time building or maintaining the GUI."Â  Swing and the Hibernate object-relational persistence software are featured in jMatter. SwiXml is a GUI generating engine for Swing applications. GUIs are described in XML documents that are parsed at runtime and then rendered into javax.swing objects, according to the SwiXml Web site. SwiXml is used mostly for desktop applications. With SwixML, code is separated from the layout like with HTML, making for easier maintenance, said Wolf Paulus, developer of SwixML and a software architect at Cardiff. Another technology discussed, Canoo UltraLightClient, leverages Swing and a Web architecture. Application logic resides on the server rather than the client. A component-oriented programming model is leveraged. The UI is rendered in Swing rather than in HTML. "You get a much richer user experience," this way, said Etienne Studer, a developer at Navis who worked on development of the framework when he worked at Canoo. Now, he uses UltraLightClient. "It's like a better AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) then," said one audience member, responding to Studer's presentation.Â  Studer cited one application of UltraLightClientClient in which it is being used in a marine terminal operations system by shipping companies. Users have access to the same UI. Another topic slated for discussion at Desktop Matters on Friday is Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation, which is the company's new presentation technology. Also on the agenda is Adobe Systems's Flex technology, for building rich Internet applications, and its Apollo software, for running Web applications off-line.