Going Beyond Integration at webMethods

With its vision of an enterprise service-oriented architecture (ESOA),
webMethods Wednesday announced new products and
partnerships at its Integration World 2003 in Orlando, Fla.

Executives at the Web services infrastructure company have been saying
for some time now that enterprise integration has reached a maturation
point. Now, they said, is the time for the company to move beyond that
and into new applications and partnerships that build upon the
integrated network.

They even have a name for it: the webMethods Fabric, a platform that
links J2EE, .NET and legacy systems together. Their ESOA platform came
together only recently, with the announcement of three webMethods
acquisitions recently.

While integration might have reached maturity in the business world, it
doesn’t mean webMethods has completely abandoned the space. Wednesday,
the company rolled out two products called Express and JMS+. Think of
it as Integration Light, with all the integration at a fraction of the
cost.

webMethods prefers to call it an enterprise service bus (ESB), which
they say is an emerging sector within the infrastructure software
industry. It integrates products on a point-to-point basis, and
officials hope will act as a springboard to a more thorough integration
process down the road, which Roy Schulte, Gartner vice president and
research fellow, calls the enterprise nervous system (ENS).

“An ESB can be a sensible first step toward a systematic ENS because it
provides the basic connectivity backbone,” he said.

Capitalizing on the popularity of RFID with many of
today’s supply chain customers, webMethods inked a deal with OATSystems
to deliver the scanning technology on its platform. When you don’t have
the resources to build the technology yourself, like IBM
, the next best thing is partnering with a company that
already has RFID.

“RFID technology will revolutionize the way products are manufactured,
tracked, sold and bought, and enterprise level integration will be a
critical component of RFID projects,” said Kareen Renaudin, webMethods
vice president of industry solutions. “By partnering with OATSystems,
webMethods will be able to deliver an out-of-the-box solution that
enables our customers to reduce the time, cost and effort of their RFID
projects.”

webMethods plans to integrate OATSystems RFID with its own
synchronization software to provide real-time inventory management, to
match up package information with its location.

Dashboards are popular with many businesses today to keep up with
business activity monitoring (BAM), providing an easy-to-understand GUI
to business processes. As such, the Fairfax, Va., company
announced it was licensing Informatica’s
PowerAnalyzer to deliver webMethods Dashboards.

The dashboards will make up one part of webMethods new Business Activity
Platform, which sits on top of its own business process Modeler and
integration software. The company also plans to sell the BAM offering
as a standalone, best-of-breed software product that can later be
integrated into webMethods infrastructure fabric.

It’s only appropriate that one of the announcements Wednesday at the
convention had to do with its new webMethods Mobile solution, which lets
on-the-go employees get corporate information from their laptop, PDA
, phones and PC tablets. Tied with its webMethods Optimize
solution — a business intelligence toolset that tracks real-time
business transactions — officials say traveling employees can get
alerts “before it has a chance to adversely affect business operations,”
the release stated.