WebMothods Makes Tech Buys Toward Suppport Of SOA
WebMethods, Fairfax, Va., said it will acquire The Mind Electric, which provides software to build, deploy and manage applications in a SOA, and The Dante Group, a startup that delivers business-activity monitoring (BAM) software. It also purchased Netegrity's DataChannel portal software assets.
WEBMETHODS EVOLVES:
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Step by step by step
>> January 2003: WebMethods ships version 6 of the webMethods Integration Platform with a Java application server from the open-source company The JBoss Group, thus adding Java development capabilities to its platform.
>> April 2003: WebMethods launches a program to help customers integrate its webMethods Integration Platform 6 with JBoss, furthering the convergence between application development and integration.
>> October 2003: WebMethods unveils acquisitions of Dante Group, a business-activity monitoring software provider, and the DataChannel portal software from Netegrity, which earlier acquired DataChannel. More significantly, webMethods announces plans to acquire The Mind Electric, a startup ISV
providing a standards-based software infrastructure to create and manage Web services and manipulate them within service-oriented architectures. The Mind Electric's chairman and chief architect, Graham Glass, is appointed CTO of webMethods.
None of these companies had yet created a viable business, either because it was still too new or because it failed to attract a large customer base, analysts said. The acquisitions totaled $32 million in cash, webMethods executives said.
For webMethods, that bargain-basement price delivers technologies, particularly from The Mind Electric, that analysts describe as "significant."
The Mind Electric's software provides the infrastructure to create, route, monitor and manage distributed applications. With this technology, webMethods is in the position to move beyond proprietary integration suites that hard-code application interactions, and into the growing area of loosely coupled Web services.
Building a Web services-based platform that goes beyond EAI is "what webMethods' customers and partners are asking for," said Mark Thomsen, co-founder of Torrance, Calif.-based solution provider Alodar Systems.
Thomsen said webMethods Integration Platform 6, released earlier this year, was webMethods' first step toward supporting SOAs through software that can be implemented incrementally rather than with the all-at-once approach required in a traditional integration suite, which can be cumbersome and expensive. The purchase of The Mind Electric will build on that strategy, he said.
WebMethods' executives said the company plans to offer a retooled version of The Mind Electric's Gaia software, to be called webMethods Fabric, by year's end. Fabric is lightweight software for creating distributed services throughout an enterprise system and enabling interaction between those services so they can respond reliably to network requests, analysts said.
Analyst Ron Schmelzer with Zapthink, Waltham, Mass., called the acquisition, and appointment of The Mind Electric Chairman Graham Glass as webMethods' new CTO, a "bold step" in webMethods' commitment to developing next-generation software for SOAs.