In another step in the consolidation of products and vendors in the SOA space, integration provider webMethods will acquire Infravio, the last remaining, independent provider of SOA registry software, for $38 million. According to Miko Matsumura, VP of Technology Standards at Infravio and InfoQ SOA editor, the acquisition positions webMethods as the only vendor in the industry to align the necessity of SOA governance with the strategic advantages of a unified SOA/BPM platform.
An integrated registry/repository is viewed by many as the key ingredient for successful SOA governance. For example, ZapThink analyst Jason Bloomberg believes the registry/repositoriy lies at the heart of SOA.
Infravio competitor Systinet had been acquired by Mercury in January (Mercury, in turn, was bought by HP in July). All of the three leading registry/repository products — Systinet 2, Fujtsu's and Software AG's CentraSite and Infravio's X-Registry — are now part of a larger product portfolio.
Only a few weeks ago, webMethods had acquired Cerebra, a repository based on semantic web standards such as RDF and OWL. It will be interesting to see if and how webMethods will integrate the two technologies.
