WebMethods Joins Microsoft Tools Partner Program

WebMethods, Fairfax, Va., will unveil Wednesday that it has joined Microsoft's Visual Studio Industry Partner (VSIP) program at the premier level, said Andy Astor, vice president of strategic solutions at WebMethods. Through the partnership--the first official one between the two companies--WebMethods and Microsoft will engage in product planning and joint marketing and sales opportunities, he said.

Astor said Microsoft asked WebMethods' to join the VSIP program because of the positive customer reception to recently released software, the WebMethods for Microsoft package. The software, released three months ago, is integrated with Visual Studio .Net and enables Visual Studio developers to access any services as native .Net services that are directly available within the Microsoft development environment.

"When we showed this to Microsoft and our customers, it generated a lot of interest," Astor said of the software. "Customers are excited about it. Both Microsoft and WebMethods see it as something that can drive customer success and [enable us to] both get increased revenue from that as well."

WebMethods already has had strong relationships with a number of J2EE-based software vendors and ships the JBoss open-source application server with its WebMethods Integration Platform. While Astor said the Microsoft platform already is "the single most popular development/deployment platform" for WebMethods' software, the new partnership shores up the company's efforts to appeal to a significantly larger group of programmers.

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"This opens up the WebMethods platform to a huge community of developers that are out there in the Visual Studio arena," Astor said.

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