WebMethods Acquires Infravio, Boosts SOA Portfolio

service-oriented architectures.

WebMethods, based in Fairfax, Va., plans to integrate Infravio's technology within its Fabric product suite by the fourth quarter of this year. In the interim, Infravio software would continue to be offered as a standalone product.

WebMethods expects to complete the acquisition of the privately held company this month. The purchase is expected to add to WebMethods's earnings per share beginning with the quarter ending March 31, 2007.

Infravio products include a SOA registry, and tools to communicate corporate policies to IT developers and help them implement those polices as they assemble the various elements of an SOA, a method for standards-based distributed computing. Applications within an SOA are linked to automate business processes. Software tools that make it possible to implement and manage corporate policies within an SOA are said to provide governance.

WebMethods is a maker of proprietary infrastructure tools for application integration. The company, however, has been moving toward becoming more of a full-service SOA vendor, following the industry trend toward standards-based integration.

"As a proprietary EAI (enterprise application integration) vendor, they really have little choice but to tell the SOA story, and in fact, they've been doing a reasonably good job telling that story, given that what they're really selling is an integration infrastructure," Jason Bloomberg, analyst for ZapThink LLC, said in a email.

In acquiring Infravio, WebMethods has the opportunity to make a strong push into the SOA market.

"Infravio is at the eye of the SOA storm, focused on registry/repository, SOA governance, and service lifecycle management," Bloomberg said. "The issue now is one of execution: can Infravio's leadership raise WebMethods' SOA efforts to a leadership position, or will webMethods' EAI ball-and-chain swamp Infravio's vision? Only time will tell."

Features Infravio technology is expected to add to WebMethods' integration platform include content validation, service-level agreement management, security enforcement, versioning, and impact analysis, WebMethods said. Those features are expected to be enhanced by the semantic metadata technology WebMethods acquired through the purchase of Cerebra, based in Carlsbad, Calif., in August.

WebMethods plans to also embed Cerebra technology into the Fabric product suite. In using semantic technology, Cerebra is able to provide additional context to metadata, so information presented to employees can give a better understanding of operational dependencies, as well as the impact of proposed changes in processes.

Infravio, based in Cupertino, Calif., has 65 employees, including 50 developers in Chennai, India. Fortune 1000 customers include Allianz Life, Level 3 Communications, Lockheed Martin, The McGraw-Hill Companies, MCI-Verizon, Providence Health System, and Sprint-Nextel, WebMethods said.