WebMethods Goes on a Shopping Spree

Enterprise application integration software developer WebMethods Inc. announced Monday the acquisition of two companies in the service-oriented architecture and portal markets, as well as the completion of a third acquisition in the business activity monitoring market.

WebMethods, of Fairfax, Va., this morning acquired The Mind Electric Inc., for its Web services platform; DataChannel Inc., for its portal technology; and The Dante Group Inc., for its real-time BAM and enterprise event management software.

While WebMethods did not release specific details of each transaction, it did report a total payout of $32 million in cash for the three companies. The TME acquisition is subject to some conditions before closing.

The acquisitions complete WebMethods strategy to provide customers with a standards-based, service-oriented architecture that veers from its traditional, proprietary EAI offering. Called WebMethods Fabric, the companys newest offering, based on Web services, bridges the gap between J2EE, .Net, Web service and legacy systems by linking all computing resources into a common enterprise framework, officials said.

Key to the Fabric approach—aside from WebMethods integration platform—are service-oriented application modules that enable functionalities the likes of security and failover to be inherently delivered within the framework.

The TME acquisition is also key in that its GLUE software provides a Web services platform for building and deploying distributed applications from any Java object—and brings .Net to Java developers.

At the same time, The Dante Groups BAM and event monitoring software—to be renamed WebMethods Optimize—will be combined with Dantes Fingerprinting technology. As part of Optimize, Fingerprinting will enable the software to learn behavioral patterns.

Separately, DataChannels software will bring a Web services-enabled portal to WebMethods table.

WebMethods also announced today that it is appointing Graham Glass, founder, chairman and chief architect of TME, as its new CTO. Jim Green, WebMethods former CTO, left earlier this year to form Composite Software.