webMethods acquires Infravio

Posted by Stefan Tilkov on Sep 11, 2006

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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.

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   Thanks

   by miko matsumura

   Thanks for posting the news, it's been a lot of hard work, but it's nice to see validation like this for Infravio's Registry Repository approach to SOA Governance.
   
   Miko (works at Infravio)

   Reply

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   Re: Thanks

   by Floyd Marinescu

   What impact might the new lack of independent registry providers have on the space?

   Reply

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   Re: Thanks

   by miko matsumura

   It might accelerate the production of open source solutions. However, as yet we havent seen a solution that seems to meet the requirements. Apache JUDDI (the UDDI project) seems to be a bit stalled. There is always FreeBXML, which is a free ebXML Registry Repository solution. But we've found at Infravio that this solution rarely competes with ours in the market. It could be that the folks who implement on that stack just never come to us.
   
   Infravio (and now webMethods) provides a lot of fairly rich and complex Governance funcationality that's often quite subtle in its use cases. If the demand keeps up, there will certainly be economic pressure to commoditize it, but for now, commercial solutions rule the roost.
   
   Miko

   Reply

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   Not the last remaining independent

   by Frank Cohen

   "the last remaining, independent provider of SOA registry software"
   
   I'm glad for Infravio to be validated as a registry/repository provider by WebMethods. It's fascinating to me to see the SOA platform providers (Software AG, Tibco, BEA, etc.) building their platforms before our eyes. BEA now has Flashline, Tibco is working on Matrix, and now WebMethods has Infravio.
   
   Pardon my self-promotion but Infravio isn't the last remaining independent. Raining Data makes the TigerLogic SOA Repository (SOAR). SOAR is different from the others in that it is built on a native XML database to provide flexibility and performance the others are unable to achieve. Details are at:
   
   www.rainingdata.com/products/tigerlogicsoar/ind...
   
   -Frank

   Reply

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   Re: Not the last remaining independent

   by miko matsumura

   You guys are publicly traded though... (Nasdaq: RDTA)
   
   I suppose it's semantics. Isnt Tigerlogic SOA Repository though and not registry? Anyhow, it's always an interesting challenge to establish a claim like that. Lots of folks out there with lots of different use cases.
   
   Miko

   Reply

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   Re: Not the last remaining independent

   by John Harby

   Good luck with this Miko. It sounds like a wise choice for webMethods. Infravio certainly has the talent to help them gain the lead in a very competitive space.

   Reply

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