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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Applications:
COMPANY LAUNCHES NEW APPROACH TO
EMPOWER ENTERPRISE CUSTOMERS
webMethods Inc, the industry's first Web services infrastructure company,
announced that it has completed the final stage of its strategic plan to
provide customers with a 100 percent standards-based, non-proprietary and
vendor neutral solution to run, measure and optimize their business.
webMethods also announced three key acquisitions in the Enterprise
Service-Oriented Architecture (ESOA), Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and
portal spaces. Specific details concerning the acquisitions are being provided
in separate announcements being issued today. Additionally, webMethods
announced that it is appointing Graham Glass, an industry visionary and
pioneer in distributed computing, as chief technology officer.
At the core of the announcement is the introduction of webMethods Fabric, a
100 percent standards-based solution that is, unlike proprietary integration
and application server products available today, capable of universally
linking all computing resources into a common enterprise fabric. Built
entirely upon an Enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture (ESOA), webMethods
Fabric bridges the worlds of J2EE, .NET, Web services and legacy systems
enabling customers to run any service, anywhere, anytime. Key to the ESOA
approach is the ability of customers to incorporate all their current
resources including packaged applications, the webMethods Integration
Platform, proprietary integration products from other vendors, as well as the
new generation of service-oriented application modules from the traditional
packaged application vendors.
"Adding webMethods Fabric to the capabilities of the webMethods Integration
Platform allows our customers to meet their toughest business process
integration challenges while gaining the benefits of a completely
standards-based and enterprise-class service-oriented architecture," said
Phillip Merrick, chairman and CEO of webMethods. "The power of this approach
will be appealing to both new and existing customers of webMethods."
The practical benefits of utilizing the enterprise fabric as a foundation
for
enterprise IT architecture are many. Among these benefits, the most compelling
is the ability to implement a true service-oriented architecture (SOA) with
quality of service capabilities, such as security and failover, being
delivered by the fabric itself. This will allow customers greater flexibility
in their selection of enterprise software applications and integration
technology, as they can now freely mix and match applications and services
with standards-based interoperability and required quality of service being
facilitated within the fabric.
According to Yefim Natis, vice president and research director at Gartner,
"Over time, lack of SOA will become a competitive disadvantage for most
enterprises. Mainstream enterprises should invest today in understanding SOA
and building SOA design and development skills." Gartner predicts that by
2006, more than 60 percent of enterprises will consider SOA a guiding
principle in designing their new mission-critical business applications and
business processes.
Enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture
The holy grail of integration technologies has been the ability to truly
achieve an environment where each enterprise resource is exposed as a service
that is accessible by any other service -- a true Enterprise Service-Oriented
Architecture (ESOA). The main impediment has been the pressure on customers to
utilize a proprietary approach from Web services, development tools and
integration technology vendors. By being forced to focus only on J2EE, .NET or
some other isolated platform, rather than addressing the real issue of
interoperability and vendor neutrality, customers have been unable to bridge
all the architectures and technologies across their enterprise.
The enterprise fabric approach makes achieving an ESOA-based enterprise
simple
by exploiting the power of any of the disparate resources that make up the
enterprise and non-invasively enhancing the limitations of those same
resources. The result is that all resources are not only able to participate
as part of the ESOA, but they are enhanced to include enterprise-class
capabilities such as service registration, dynamic discovery, management,
automatic failover, distributed security, XML message processing, monitoring,
auditing, exception handling, clustering, and a real-time, browser-based
graphical management console.
webMethods Fabric is built upon, and supports, the significant standards
for
Web services infrastructure, including SOAP 1.2, WSDL 1.2, WS-Routing,
WS-Security, WS-Signatures, WS-Encryption and UDDI. webMethods Fabric (based
on the product previously known as TME GAIA) is currently in beta release, and
will ship within 90 days.
New Products Broaden Overall Offering
As the final stage in webMethods' strategic plan to provide customers with
a
100 percent standards-based, non-proprietary and vendor neutral Web services
infrastructure, webMethods Fabric is the perfect complement to the webMethods
Integration Platform. The webMethods Integration Platform has been designed
from its inception on a service-oriented architecture and to support Web
services standards. As a result, customers who require additional integration
technology to link non-SOA enabled resources can do so with a comprehensive
solution from a single vendor.
In addition, to address the increased need for enterprise event management
and
portal services, webMethods is also announcing the introduction of webMethods
Optimize and webMethods Portal. These new offerings are the result of the
consummation of the acquisitions of Dante Group Inc and the DataChannel portal
technology respectively . The result is the combination of world-class
integration, portal and analytics technologies together with webMethods Fabric
to enable customers to build a new generation of business systems that provide
unparalleled visibility and control.
Expanded Solutions For Java And .NET Developers
webMethods is announcing that it has entered a definitive merger agreement
to
acquire The Mind Electric Inc (TME) and its popular product offering GLUE, an
easy-to-use Web service platform for building and deploying enterprise-class
distributed applications from any Java object. GLUE, which is immensely
popular with the developer community, is a groundbreaking platform that brings
the simplicity and power of .NET to Java users while bridging the
interoperability gap between .NET and J2EE. Recently recognized by Microsoft
as the preferred mechanism for bridging J2EE and .NET, webMethods intends to
market the product under the product name webMethods GLUE.
The company is also appointing Graham Glass, founder, chairman and chief
architect of TME, as its new chief technology officer. Glass, a pioneer in
distributed computing was previously the CTO and co-founder of ObjectSpace, a
Dallas-based company specializing in distributed object technology. During his
tenure at ObjectSpace, Glass received an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the
Year award in 1996, as well as several industry awards for the development of
the Voyager and JGL product lines.
The total consideration for the acquisitions is approximately $32 million
in
cash, excluding advisory fees and transaction-related expenses, which
generally will be paid in the current quarter. The specific financial terms of
the individual transactions were not disclosed. The consummation of the
acquisition of TME is subject to various conditions precedent.
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