Software AG Acquires webMethods

German Software AG, Europe’s largest systems software and SOA platform provider has announced its (planned) acquisition of integration vendor webMethods, Inc., for approximately $546 million. The new company is very likely going to become a major player in the crowded SOA market, which has undergone some significant consolidation in the during the last year.

Software AG’s announcement suggests this is a major step towards their stated goal of becoming a €1 billion software company. According to Software AG CEO Karl-Heinz Streibich, the acquisition positions Software AG as one of the global leaders in SOA and BPM. He also stressed the expected foothold in the critical North American market that webMethods will bring to the company. This is another in a series of acquisitions that have occurred in the last 15 months, including the acquisition of SOA governance vendor Systinet by Mercury, which was in turn acquired by HP in July (see here and here for coverage on InfoQ). In September, webMethods acquired Systinet competitor Infravio, which now becomes part of Software AG as part of the webMethods deal.

As Software AG has its own governance solution with CentraSite, co-developed with Fujitsu, an obvious question is how this and the Infravio registry are going to be integrated. InfoQ had chance to question Ivo Totev, Vice President crossvision Product Strategy at SOA, about this, who highlighted the reliance on JAX-R as something that will pay off now:

In the mid term we will of course develop and support both products. Later we will combine best of both worlds. This is the beauty of standards - since both are based on JAX-R this will be achieved without rewriting the one or the other product. Customers will benefit from this strategy. No matter if CentraSite or Infravio: there is a clear upgrade path to future releases at the pace of our customers - and there is a clear path towards increased innvovation from the combined engineering team.

Totev highlighted webMethods' B2B, BAM and BPM capabilities, and Software AG's strength in SOA Enablement and Legacy Modernization.

Jason Bloomberg, Senior Analyst at ZapThink, shared his opinion with InfoQ:

This is huge news in the SOA space, because the combination of Software AG and webMethods is now second only to IBM in terms of both traditional integration and SOA capabilities. This is a marketshare play and a SOA play entirely. Software AG gets a much stronger North American presence, and they can now leave the likes of TIBCO and Oracle in their dust. Mark my words, Larry Ellison is not going to be happy about this news.

While we don't know about Larry Ellison's personal feelings, it will definitely be very interesting what kind of impact the combination of both companies can make in the SOA space.