Well that answers that then: webMethods to acquire Infravio
BEA's
acquisition of Flashline a few weeks ago caused the other Neil to ponder:
But when I look a bit deeper, I do wonder why BEA didn't end up chomping Infravio instead. (They might well have tried and failed for some reason, of course - if anyone knows anything about that, let me know!)
Today, we have a possible answer
: Infravio is to be acquired by webMethods.
The fact that Infravio is being acquired does not come as a great surprise! There is broad agreement that SOA registry/repository technology is one of the key capabilities of the service infrastructure required for effective SOA initiaitves and Infravio is one of the comparatively few pure-play providers of that technology. The likes of BEA, HP, IBM and Oracle have all invested heavily in a combination of in-house development, OEM relationships and acquisition to bolster the registry/repository capabilities of their offerings and it was only a matter of time before Infravio went the way of Flashline and Systinet and became an acquisition target.
I must admit that webMethods would not have been top of my list of potential acquirers though. With Systinet now out of play, I could have seen the likes of Oracle or SAP (and BEA pre-Flashline) opening their wallets. So this is a bit of a coup for webMethods.
This certainly makes sense for webMethods. In
our assessment of webMethods service infrastructure offerings, we discuss the fact that webMethods' Fabric, and more specifically its Servicenet product, provides surprisingly strong support for service lifecycle management but that:
webMethods plans to enhance these capabilities - adding service dependency checking and impact analysisand
there are areas where the two technology environments [Enterprise Service Platform and Servicenet] could be better integrated - for example in the specification, storage and publication of information about service policies, service interfaces, and integration orchestrationsThe Infravio acqusition should enable webMethods to both provide the lifecycle management enhancements and improve the integration of the Enterprise Service Platform and Servicenet.
webMethods has done a good job of exploiting its heritage in application integration and combining it with facilities for implementing and managing a SOA initiative to offer a comprehensive set of service infrastructure capabilities. The Infravio acquisition certainly adds to what is already a strong offering and webMethods is striving to shift to more of a business-focussed proposition based around business process improvement and vertical industry solutions built on top of Fabric.
Despite these strengths, the challenge for the company is to exploit its current advantage and remain relevant in the face of competitors with far greater resources at their disposal. With SOA governance and registry/repository so hot at the moment, the acquisition should certainly increase awareness of webMethods amongst organisations embarking on SOA initiatives. Whether webMethods can maintain the momentum once the buzz has died down is less certain.
