Archive for the ‘webMethods’ Category

Software AG goes in an interesting direction for SOA governance

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

As part of yesterday’s release of the latest iteration of its webMethods Insight product Software AG announced an OEM partnership with Progress Software. This announcement adds the Actional runtime SOA management and monitoring technology (which Progress acquired back in January 2006) to Software AG’s existing Centrasite design-time governance capabilities (which were bolstered by the acquisition of Infravio in September 2006) and the runtime policy enforcement provided by its webMethods X-Broker and partner Layer 7’s XML Firewall.

The incorporation of runtime SOA management and monitoring functionality into Insight is a necessary evolution of Software AG-webMethods integration strategy that we commented on just over a year ago. It’s long been our position that SOA is more than a standards-based approach to software development and integration. The business value of a service-oriented initiative depends on a recognition that software services are experienced, just like their real-world analogues. The quality of that experience depends on a governance approach that extends throughout the service lifecycle, where the contracts defined when services are designed are subsequently enforced through policies once they are deployed and running – and where runtime metrics are captured to provide insight into the service level quality that is actually exeprienced. Furthermore, those metrics can be used to inform and support change management processes, so closing the SOA lifecycle loop.

Whilst the announcement doesn’t come as any great surprise, the source of the runtime management and monitoring functionality does. When Oracle confirmed it’s intention to acquire BEA, I said:

It [the acquisition] leaves some of the other bigger specialist players – TIBCO, SoftwareAG (and to a lesser extent Progress and Red Hat) in an interesting position. On the one hand they will be more attractive, particularly for SOA and BPM, to customers looking for an application-independent infrastructure offering.

Software AG has gone to a potential competitor for the mantle of best-of-breed, specialist alternative to the likes of IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. If you had told me on Friday that Software AG was going to strike an OEM deal for SOA management and monitoring I’d have put my money on AmberPoint, which has historically been the OEM of choice for the likes of BEA and TIBCO.

I am not quite sure what to make of this decision. AmberPoint doesn’t compete with Software AG directly and has established a healthy and growing customer base, as well as partnerships with some of the leading systems integrators – and a technology partnership with Software AG! Software AG’s decision comes not long after Oracle’s decision to drop AmberPoint. As we pointed out in our analysis of Oracle’s roadmap for the BEA integration, we don’t have any hard evidence for Oracle’s claims that it had received negative feedback from BEA customers but it’s something we will continue to explore. In light of the decision to go with Actional, it will be intriguing to see how the partnership evolves and how things pan out when Software AG and Progress are in a competitive situation.

This acquisition should be welcome news to Software AG customers that have invested in the company’s SOA offerings as it will save them the time and effort of plugging the runtime governance gap that existed prior to the partnership. Those embarking on a significant SOA intiative should also give Software AG careful consideration, particularly if they are not wedded to one of the mega-platform providers.

Posted in AmberPoint, BEA, Oracle, Progress, SOA, Software AG, TIBCO, governance, ibm, webMethods | 12 Comments »

Policy interoperability – a step in the right direction

Thursday, May 3rd, 2007
At the end of last week a webMethods’ press release popped into my inbox highlighting a recent demonstration of interoperability between the company’s UDDI-based registry (acquired with Infravio), HP’s Systinet registry and one of Layer 7 Technologies’ SecureSpan XML appliances.  In a nutshell, the three companies showed how policies attached to services in a UDDI registry (using the Web Services Policy 1.5 Framework and Attachment candidate standard specification) can be exchanged with Layer 7’s appliance for policy enforcement.

Prasad Yendluri of the Office of the CTO at webMethods had this to say:

greatly enhance[s] the interoperability of all of the components used to achieve policy-based governance

a point which was reinforced by Toufic Boubez, CTO of Layer 7 who claimed such interoperability provides:

a powerful standards-based solution for overall SOA management and governance

Here at MWD we certainly agree that a policy-based approach is essential for effective management of the service lifecycle. Policies should capture and enforce the obligations and expectations of service providers and consumers represented in service contracts to maximise the quality of the service experience. Interoperability of policies is also essential, given the variety of service infrastructure technologies required to support any significant SOA initiative. However, as I pointed out over a year ago:

WS-Policy does not deal with semantics: it provides a framework within which those semantics can be defined. Support for WS-Policy provides no guarantee that the way one vendor defines a particular policy can be interpreted and enforced effectively by another. That will require agreement on semantics.

For these reasons, I doubt that the three participants simply installed the products, created some services and policies and then demonstrated policy enforcement: they first had to agree how the policies would be represented in WS-Policy.

Don’t get me wrong: I think this is a positive step in the right direction. However, it’s important for those involved in SOA initiatives to recognise, as I pointed out last year, that a number of significant steps still have to be taken to reach the semantic interoperability goal that’s required:

It’s not going to be easy! It will require the participation and cooperation of vendors of all shapes and sizes. Vendors, moreover, who are going to have to relinquish the control that ownership of policy definition can provide.

Posted in HP, Layer7, SOA, UDDI, governance, policy, webMethods | No Comments »

MWD FM SOA interview: webMethods

Thursday, April 26th, 2007

Here’s another in our series of interviews with vendors offering SOA “solutions”. This time we spoke to Miko Matsumura, head of product marketing for SOA at webMethods.

In this conversation we ask the usual four questions – and also chat about the importance of webMethods’ SOA Link program, the role of the Infravio Governance Rules Engine, and SOA as an enabler of federated/cross enterprise business processes.

The podcast episode lasts 25′34″. You can download the audio here or you can subscribe to the feed.

Posted in MWD, SOA, podcast, webMethods | No Comments »

webMethods becomes SWAG

Thursday, April 5th, 2007

Apologies for the poor pun, it’s the evening before the Easter break (public holidays on Friday and Monday here in the UK) and I’m feeling festive.

So, it’s finally happened. For those of us with the dubious title of “industry watcher” it’s not a particular surprise to see webMethods acquired. We’d heard rumours for some time that the company might be readying itself financially and organisationally for a sale. Clearly the 25% price premium that Software AG (SWAG) plans to pay in purchasing the company at $9.15 a share represents a good deal for its shareholders, as webMethods’ stock had got stuck around $7 for quite some months.

But what is a surprise (to me at least) is the buyer.

For one thing, we’re used to big industry whales swallowing small specialist minnows: this is one medium-sized software company buying another medium-sized software company. SWAG’s 2006 full-year revenue totalled in the region of $500m$650m. webMethods has a different financial year to SWAG, but its revenue in the equivalent period totalled roughly $200m.

There’s one particular feature of the two companies’ income statements which is shared: both companies make more money from software maintenance than they do from selling new product licenses. Both companies are living more off their past success than their current success (although the balance seems as if it could be tipping the right way in SWAG’s case).

Software AG is a company with a long history as a middleware company, but it’s not a glorious one. It scored huge success in the 1970s with the ADABAS DBMS and 1980s with the Natural language and development environment, but none of its more recent infrastructure product developments – EntireX (object and message broker), Tamino (XML database/integration platform) and Bolero (Java app server) have penetrated far beyond its established loyal customer base. What’s interesting, though, is that with new SWAG products Centrasite (SOA registry/repository) and Crossvision (BPM, ESB, legacy integration, composite application development) now on the market, the webMethods acquisition certainly doesn’t look like one to be based around technology. There’s a hell of a lot of technology overlap.

So this acquisition appears to be more about acquisition of customers and “mindshare” in complementary regions. Despite a US subsidiary with a long history (which started off independently in 1972, was bought by its parent in 1988, then spun off through a venture buy-out in 1997, and re-purchased in 2001), SWAG’s visibility in North America is not high (any of our US readers heard of EntireX, Tamino or Bolero?). Despite webMethods’ reorganisations which have cut back the size of its European operations over the past years, it seems to retain very high recognition in North America.

What will I be watching? I’ll be watching to see what happens to products and people as the two companies come together. Given the huge portfolio overlap, from a product and technology – and ultimately a customer – standpoint, this will be a difficult integration to pull off.

UPDATE: John Conley, webMethods’ Director of PR, got in touch with me to point out a couple of errors in the original post, which I’ve changed above.

Posted in SOA, Software AG, acquisition, webMethods | No Comments »