July 26, 2007; 04:56 AM
Software AG, a global leader in business infrastructure software, today unveiled the webMethods product suite as the industry's most comprehensive product portfolio for business integration, service-oriented architecture (SOA), business process management (BPM), and legacy modernization. With industry-leading technology spanning the entire portfolio, the webMethods product suite maintains and extends current investments in Software AG's Crossvision and webMethods technologies. The fully-integrated and optimized product suite ultimately delivers faster and more significant payback from enterprise investments in business infrastructure software. These benefits include faster implementation, more powerful collaboration, codeless development, extended reuse of IT assets, and lower operating costs.
"Customers will benefit greatly as our combined product suite delivers significant enhancements within every segment. The depth and breadth of the webMethods product suite and the industry leading performance that it delivers is unsurpassed competitively," said Dr. Peter Kurpick, Software AG's executive board member with management responsibilities for the webMethods business line. "By moving quickly to capitalize on the webMethods acquisition, we're delivering on our commitment to being a leader in the SOA and BPM markets. Going forward, our expanded product portfolio will also allow us to be aggressive in building upon this foundation to deliver additional customer innovation and value."
The webMethods product suite maintains current functionality while delivering a number of major enhancements. Existing Crossvision customers will benefit from richer support for business integration and B2B; a more deeply integrated business process management suite (BPMS); award-winning business activity monitoring (BAM) capabilities; and additional resources for composite application development. webMethods users will enjoy access to a full-suite of legacy modernization products; additional support for application development; and an expanded ESB offering. Both sets of customers will also benefit from the accelerated development of a best-in-class foundation for SOA lifecycle governance. The latter builds upon Software AG's continuing commitment to jointly develop the CentraSite platform with Fujitsu.
According to Massimo Pezzini, vice president and Distinguished Analyst for Gartner, Inc., "users have invested millions of dollars in middleware so investment protection is what they ask to their suppliers. However, as SOA adoption grows, users are also requiring comprehensive SOA enabling infrastructures encompassing BPM, BAM, integration and governance."
Software AG also announced that it expects to ship the next release of the webMethods products -- version 7.1 -- later this summer as scheduled. This forthcoming release builds upon earlier themes of accelerating application delivery, fostering re-use as a cost and time-saving alternative to development, and enabling faster, smarter business decisions as a means for achieving sustainable process improvements. This release is also distinguished by its focus on expanding the extensibility of SOA as well as by the enhancements its delivers for the product suite's best-in-class, standards-based enterprise service bus (ESB) offering.
webMethods Product Suite at a glance: Software AG addresses the critical business infrastructure software requirements of global enterprises
Enterprises need a fully-integrated business infrastructure to cost- effectively support rapid change and continuous innovation. Software AG's comprehensive approach to business infrastructure software ensures this necessary alignment and optimization of processes, systems and data within heterogeneous environments. This maximizes business responsiveness while enabling enterprises to manage IT as a portfolio for maximum efficiency.
Fundamental to these efforts is the webMethods product suite, which helps enterprises transform legacy systems and data into more productive corporate assets, integrate disparate applications, implement SOA and improve critical business processes. By bringing these capabilities together within a single product suite, enterprises can achieve faster business results. Customers also benefit from the additional synergies -- more powerful collaboration, lower operating costs, greater productivity and simplified reuse of corporate IT assets -- enabled by the use of a single business infrastructure software platform.
Due to the highly complementary nature of their respective technologies, the acquisition will accelerate each company's product roadmap as key features become more quickly available. Customers will benefit almost immediately from this enhanced portfolio of products. At the same time, the expanded user community created by the acquisition will serve to maximize long-term value.
Specific features of the webMethods product suite include:
-- SOA governance - Software AG will bring together CentraSite and the
webMethods Infravio X-Registry to create an unparalleled platform for
addressing the full SOA governance lifecycle. As a result,
CentraSite's extensible metadata management and modeling capabilities
will be enriched by the addition of the policy management and
enforcement functionality offered by Infravio. In addition to
establishing uniform governance of IT assets, the unified offering also
simplifies asset maintenance by automatically defining semantic
relationships and dependencies between assets. Software AG will also
be merging the CentraSite and SOA Link communities to create an even
more powerful SOA governance community.
-- ESB & B2B - The webMethods ESB builds upon webMethods' enterprise-class
Integration Server to deliver proven performance, scalability, security
and support for key industry standards. Customers will now benefit
from three complementary and interchangeable choices for integration
and interoperability within a single product architecture. More
specifically, the webMethods ESB will be offered in Mediation,
Orchestration and Integration editions for progressively more demanding
requirements. These products encompass and replace the webMethods
Infravio X-Broker, the Crossvision Service Orchestrator and the
webMethods Integration Server products respectively. Furthermore,
Software AG will also be introducing enhancements to the webMethods B2B
offering, such as trading partner self-service and business analytics
spanning partner transactions, in the forthcoming release.
-- BPM and BAM - The top-ranked webMethods BPMS is the company's primary
business process management offering going forward. The business
process management suite includes process and application design and
execution, human workflow, rules, simulation and out-of-the-box process
analytics. Leveraging their strong partnership, Software AG will also
continue to fully support the Fujitsu Interstate offering for a minimum
of five years. The webMethods product suite is also differentiated by
the availability of powerful application composition capabilities that
allow end-users to effortlessly create AJAX-based, Web 2.0 style rich
internet applications and user interfaces. Software AG also plans to
extend webMethods' patented business activity monitoring capabilities
with new editions targeting additional business requirements.
-- Legacy Modernization - Software AG will continue to offer three
holistic approaches for mainframe integration - EntireX for
transaction-oriented integration; ApplinX for screen-based integration;
and CONNX Solutions' data access products for data-focused integration.
EntireX will be enhanced through the inclusion of webMethods' patented
mainframe integration technology. This means that current users of
webMethods Mainframe will be able to migrate their existing
functionality to the EntireX platform. Software AG will also continue
to fully support webMethods' DataDirect NEON Shadow customers.
Other available components of the product suite include Information Integrator for creating customized views of information from existing business data and Master Data Manager for unifying and consolidating master data throughout the enterprise.
Forthcoming releases are designed to remain backwards compatible with previous products. Enhanced products with standards-based interoperability will begin shipping this quarter will full availability of the upgraded product suite expected to commence in early 2008.
With over 4,000 enterprise customers in over 70 countries and annual revenues rapidly approaching $1B USD, the acquisition establishes Software AG as a global leader in the business infrastructure software market with significant strengths in the SOA and BPM sectors. Software AG's webMethods business line brings together the company's Crossvision business unit with the newly acquired webMethods resources. This newly combined unit is being managed by Dr. Kurpick and draws upon executives from both companies as part of its leadership team. In terms of size, it will be a full peer with Software AG's Enterprise Transaction Systems (ETS) business line, which encompasses the company's Adabas and Natural resources.
Software AG | Uhlandstrasse 12 | 64297 Darmstadt | Germany
Software technology to increase the value of enterprise IT systems
Software AG's 4,000 global customers achieve measurable business results by modernizing and automating their IT systems and rapidly building new systems to meet growing business demands. The company's industry-leading product portfolio includes best-in-class solutions for managing data, enabling service oriented architecture, and improving business processes. By combining proven technology with industry expertise and best practices, our customers improve and differentiate their businesses - faster.
Software AG has more than 35 years of global IT experience and 3,800 employees serving customers in 70 countries. The company is headquartered in Germany and listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange (TecDAX, ISIN DE 0003304002 / SOW). Software AG posted total revenues of euro483 million in 2006.
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