Policy interoperability - a step in the right direction
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 governanceHere 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.
Labels: governance, HP, Layer7, policy, SOA, UDDI, webMethods
MWD FM SOA interview: webMethods
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.Labels: MWD, podcast, SOA, webMethods
webMethods becomes SWAG
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.
Labels: acquisition, SOA, Software AG, webMethods
