WebMethods Acquires Infravio for SOA Boost

WebMethods, which develops process integration software, announced Sept. 11 its intentions to acquire Infravio, a company best known for its service-oriented architecture governance repository and its tireless work with SOA standards-setting groups.

WebMethods will pay about $38 million for Infravio in a deal that is expected to close by month’s end. The company employs 65 people, including 50 developers in Chennai, India. All of the employees, including founder Srinivas Balasubramanian, will be moving over to WebMethods.

The acquisition of Infravio further builds out WebMethods’ capabilities in the SOA world by adding a services registry and governance functionality—key capabilities as more companies move toward a services-based approach to building composite applications based on specific business processes. While a lot of software developers have evolved to the point of providing services—components of their software available for integration with other services—there is still a growing need for the ability to register and govern the growing mass of services.

“As more groups across the enterprise adopt SOA, the need for governance becomes more acute,” Miko Matsumura, vice president of marketing at Infravio, told eWEEK. “This jump-starts our efforts to address this market demand as well as advances customers’ ability to create a governed enterprisewide portfolio of capabilities that can be recombined into business services.”

Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with ZapThink, in Waltham, Mass., said WebMethods has “seen the SOA writing on the wall for a while now. 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.”

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