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webMethods INTRODUCES ENTERPRISE SERVICES PLATFORM

webMethods Inc announced the webMethods Enterprise Services Platform, a standards-based business integration software solution for building an industrial-strength Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). The webMethods Enterprise Services Platform combines the proven, mature enterprise application integration technology, messaging and event-driven capabilities from the webMethods Integration Platform with the service-oriented architecture capabilities of webMethods Fabric to create the industry's first comprehensive Web services-based integration infrastructure.

The webMethods Enterprise Services Platform enables customers to achieve a quick quantifiable return on their infrastructure investment and extend other information technology investments by linking business processes, seamlessly integrating enterprise and legacy applications and databases, and enabling enterprise-scale Web services deployment. The webMethods Enterprise Services Platform allows an enterprise to leverage its existing software investments and expose those assets to the enterprise as business services. The combination of this unique capability and the robust, proven infrastructure of the webMethods' Enterprise Services Platform creates the technology foundation for business process optimization and composite application development.

"The webMethods Enterprise Services Platform builds on the tremendous success of the webMethods 6 architecture and the powerful capabilities of webMethods Fabric," said Kristin Weller, executive vice president of product development for webMethods Inc. "While each one of the technologies represented in the Enterprise Services Platform is, in and of itself, significant and important to our customers, it is the combined strength of these technologies and the natural synergies between them that create true product differentiation and drive further value and return on investment to our customers."

At the core of the Enterprise Services Platform is the proven, mature business integration capabilities of the webMethods Integration Platform, which allows customers to integrate existing applications and establish electronic communications both inside and outside of the enterprise and incorporate these resources seamlessly into an enterprise-class SOA. The webMethods Enterprise Services Platform allows IT assets of the enterprise to be published, managed and orchestrated as Web services in a SOA, even those resources created without any consideration for Web services. With so much investment tied up in existing systems, this is the most expedient and cost-effective path to populating a SOA with the Web services that higher-level tools, portals and other service-based applications can leverage.

The webMethods Enterprise Services Platform is the industry's first solution that combines the strengths of event-driven and SOA capabilities into a single platform. By combining SOA infrastructure capabilities with a highly scalable message brokering infrastructure, webMethods delivers the benefits of service-orientation and real-time, event-driven architecture in a single solution.

The webMethods Enterprise Services Platform also provides the ability to implement enterprise-caliber service-oriented infrastructure delivered by the capabilities of webMethods Fabric. By leveraging these capabilities, the webMethods Enterprise Services Platform enables enterprises to go from small, static, brittle, ad hoc networks of unmanaged Web services to larger, dynamic, robust, coordinated networks of managed services.

Additional benefits of the Enterprise Services Platform include:

  • Full Standards Support. The webMethods Enterprise Services Platform supports all the relevant XML, SOA and Web services standards. Additionally, as a Java-based solution and with planned support for .NET, webMethods' software provides the customer with the assurance of maximum interoperability in their environment.
  • Business Service Orchestration. Enhancing IT organizations' ability to react to the changing requirements and demands of the business, the webMethods Enterprise Services Platform enables enterprises to easily model and orchestrate business processes using any of the services within the SOA.
  • Integrated event-driven messaging support. The webMethods Enterprise Services Platform offers a Web services interface to webMethods' proven messaging facilities. For customers with J2EE-based messaging requirements, webMethods also offers a JMS interface to the underlying messaging environment.
  • Leverage Existing Skill Sets. The webMethods Enterprise Services Platform allows an enterprise to leverage existing investments in technology, J2EE, .NET, mainframe or legacy systems through the reuse of those skillsets within the webMethods environment. For example, if an organization's IT department is experienced in programming in Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET, they can allow those programmers to code logic in the .NET environment which takes advantage of, and plugs seamlessly into, the webMethods Enterprise Services Platform. This reduces overall learning curve and allows departments to adopt quicker, deploy faster and realize a more rapid return on investment.
  • Vendor and Technology Neutrality. The webMethods Enterprise Services Platform is designed to be completely vendor, technology and platform agnostic. By offering a solution of total neutrality, webMethods' customers can leverage all existing hardware and software systems, including existing middleware systems and proprietary enterprise application integration technologies, to realize a lower total cost of ownership.
  • Dynamic Scalability. With the webMethods Enterprise Services Platform, additional hardware can be added to the infrastructure without having to bring the system down and recompile any code. All services can be immediately provisioned and utilized by the environment.
  • Distributed Manageability. The webMethods Enterprise Services Platform allows the system to manage any Web service asset in the infrastructure, whether they originate from webMethods' software or other service-based technology solutions. For example, an ERP-based Web service can be registered with the Enterprise Services Platform and automatically gain instrumentation and management of that service and the business processes which it may participate in.
  • Performance and Reliability. Utilizing a distributed Grid architecture, the webMethods Enterprise Services Platform ensures that there is no central point of failure which can bring down the entire system or make the whole system temporarily unavailable. The webMethods solution also enables processing load to be balanced dynamically and intelligently across available resources within the infrastructure.
  • Location Transparency. In a distributed system, the network takes care of discovering and finding where services live and then transparently invoking them when necessary. For enterprise assets and business services, the Enterprise Services Platform transparently manages the discovery and execution of services across the Grid, eliminating the hardwiring between service consumers and producers that make systems less adaptable to change.
  • Deployment Flexibility. The webMethods Enterprise Services platform provides customers with the flexibility to be deployed in a hosted mode, where it runs in application servers and provides them with a rich set of integration and SOA infrastructure capabilities. It can also be deployed as a transparent intermediary between Web services, allowing services from diverse hardware platforms (including mobile devices) to be incorporated very efficiently into the enterprise SOA.
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